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by EwanG·13y ago·view on hn ↗
One of my main hobbies is photography. I do mainly outdoor shots, and really enjoy macros of flowers. The problem being that "oh last weekend I took an amazing shot of a purple flower" isn't all that helpful for someone who is trying to find a picture of an iris. When someone comes up with an algorithm that can take my shot, compare it to a library, and tell me what wildflower it is, I will be a happy camper. I suspect Flickr and 500px will also become more valuable places since it would be possible to correlate geotagged shots with flora to document what seems to be there.
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It's not quite what you want, but I worked on Leafsnap [1], which automatically identifies trees by their leaves, using computer vision techniques. We focused on leaves since they are present throughout much more of the year than flowers. Our free apps also include high-resolution, high-quality photos of all aspects of the species we cover -- leaves, flowers, fruits, bark, etc. So you can at least browse through and compare the flowers you're looking at with those in the app.

Our current coverage is of the trees of the northeast US (about 200 species), but we are working on expanding that.

[1] http://leafsnap.com