What technology won't do

[ellarien]

I like putting names to things, particularly flora and fauna. The web helps, but it does rather depend on having a good guess at the name to start with. It occurred to me that what I really want to be able to do is to upload an image to Google and have it find similar ones and come back with the identification. Sadly, as far as I know the technology isn't there yet, image recognition being a much harder problem for computers than it is for people.

On the other hand, putting something up on LJ with a query or a wrong identification seems to work fairly well, along the same general lines as posting wrong information to Usenet and waiting for the corrections.

Failing that, I could look it up in a book, retro though the concept is.

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

That kind of image searching would be fabulous indeed. There are plants in my garden that I have yet to identify after having lived here for three years, and I too am the kind of person who likes putting names to things.