This is from a few months ago but really interesting work from some university students that trained a popular machine learning model on data from iNaturalist.nz. The app is pretty good at identifying endemic species. The entire model is installed with the app which means that it works offline.
The Android version, which wasn’t ready when that story was written, is now on the Play Store. Haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.
Edit: Just tried it with a Tarata and it guessed it with 100% confidence. And it’s free. Cool.
That’s cool! It sounds like you’ve given it a go, have you compared to international apps like PlantSnap to see if it gives better results given it’s only looking for NZ species?
I hadn’t heard about iNaturalist until I visited an exhibition at the Puke Ariki museum in New Plymouth that explains a project to classify species off the Taranaki coast and the publish everything on iNaturalist.
I haven’t tested it against international apps. This app uses EfficientNetV2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00298
There is a web version available too: https://what-is-this.cms.waikato.ac.nz/
It seems to fail on pictures of elephants so maybe it isn’t trained on everything in the world…
Fails on the elephant test? That’s kinda funny
I love that it’s all working locally, does it handle plants as well? (All the images show animals)
What happens if you point it at Brian Tamaki?
It will tell us what species his hair is
What is wrong with iNatrralist? It’s ID normally seems quite good and then is backed up by some incredible real people
iNaturalist is great, but it takes time. This app is instant. I’ll definitely get a lot of use out of it myself.
I’ve found the auto ID great in iNaturalist
I didn’t realise they had an app, let alone an auto ID feature. I’m going to go and check it out now.
Edit: It works well. I think one of the big benefits of the Waikato Uni app is that it works offline, without creating an observation, etc. And it does seem slightly better at IDing things in my quick tests. I’m glad you put me on to the iNaturalist app though. It’s good to have both.
This reminds me of an NZ Birds app that disappeared a few years ago that I used to love. It had recordings of their calls which was wonderful.
