▲ 1 points

Tell HN: Somebody should make a rock and mineral identification app

by peter_d_sherman·8y ago·1 comments·view on hn ↗

Imagine this: You're out camping or hiking, and you see a particular stone or rock that captures your fancy. You take a picture of it on your smartphone. Now, it identifies what kind of rock or mineral you're looking at, and takes you to the Wikipedia page for that rock or mineral.

How could you make this app? Well, first you would make a database of all known mineral compounds, then you'd download all images that Google said were related to it. Once you've got all of that mess, feed it to a machine learning algorithm. Use the results of that to identify newly photographed images.

It probably won't be that good at first (maybe it would give a statistical percentage for a match, like there's a 66% chance this is Calcite, etc.), but with more time, it might get better...

Why do I want something like this? Well, it would have applications ranging from mere appreciation of stones and mineral compounds to maybe something could help you if you were trapped on a desert isle, to future space travel and planetary exploration... does anyone agree?

I'm working on something similar to this for prospecting. Unfortunately a major issue is that even minor impurities can radically alter the appearance of minerals. Google corundum if you want a good example. Another issue is that people tend to post pictures online of exceptional samples which are pretty much by definition very different from what one would expect to find in nature. Finally, visual inspection is often not sufficient to determine what mineral something is, even if you know exactly what to look for; other tests such as scratch tests or chemical tests, etc are used to make the final determination.

All in all you're probably not going to be able to make a general rock identifier that gives useful results for everything. You may get away with something more limited, but even then you're going to need a better database of images than google for training. I agree though it would be cool to have.