I’m a bit late to the party in starting to tinker with TensorFlow, but nevertheless I’ve been having some product ideas (some dumber than others) for real-world applications of machine learning, and here’s one of the stupider ones:
If you know me at all, you know that one of my hobbies is foraging for wild mushrooms. Going to the forest to forage for mushrooms is a time-honored tradition in Russia and many other Slavic countries. I also derive great pleasure from sharing this hobby with other people, and telling them how fun, challenging, and rewarding this activity can be.
Therefore, I give you – MushroomHuntr: an Android app that can identify different varieties of mushrooms! It uses a neural network to perform image recognition in real time, to tell you what kind of mushroom you’re looking at.
Huge legal disclaimer: Do not actually rely on this app to differentiate poisonous mushrooms from edible ones! The app provides a rough guess of the identity of a mushroom, not a definitive identification.
Under the hood, the app uses the Inception v3 model developed by Google, with the top layer of the model re-trained on a large collection of mushroom images. Many of the training images were taken from Wikimedia Commons, and others came from my personal photos that I’ve taken over the years.
The app can distinguish between about twelve varieties of mushrooms, most of which are native to North America and Europe. All of the trained varieties are common enough to be found easily in parks and forests, to maximize the app’s usefulness for the novice mushroom hunter.
When the app is launched, it automatically enables your phone’s camera, and starts attempting to recognize anything it sees in the image. Therefore, all you need to do is aim the camera at a mushroom, and see what it says!
To maximize the accuracy of the mushroom recognition, try looking at the mushroom from the side, and bring the camera close enough for the mushroom to fill up most of the frame, like this:
I won’t make this app available on the Google Play Store for the time being, while I continue to refine the model, but if you’d like to check it out, you can build it from source code, or contact me for a pre-built APK that you can install on your device.