FlowerChecker, also known as Kindwise,[1] is a company that uses machine learning to identify natural objects from images. This includes plants and their diseases, but also insects and mushrooms.[2][3][4] It is based in Brno, Czech Republic. It was founded in 2014 by Ondřej Veselý, Jiří Řihák, and Ondřej Vild, at the time Ph.D. students.[3][5]
Features & Tools
FlowerChecker offers multiple products.
The FlowerChecker app was launched in April 2014 for Android and later that year for iOS. [2][3][5] It enables users to submit photographs of the object they want to identify.[2][3]The photographs are then examined by an international team of experts in botany and horticulture.[2][3]
Plant.id is a machine learning-based plant identification API launched in 2018,[6] with the plant disease identification API, plant.health, released in April 2022.[4] The plant.id API is suitable for integration into other software, such as mobile apps[7] or urban trees from remote-sensing imagery.[8]
Other products include insect.id,[9] mushroom.id[10] and crop.health are machine learning-based identification APIs for the identification of insects, fungi and economically important plants,[11] respectively, and include also online public demos.
Recognition
In 2019, FlowerChecker won the Idea of the Year award in the AI Awards organized by the Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic.[12] In 2020, an academic study comparing ten free automated image recognition apps showed that plant.id's performance excelled in most of the parameters studied.[7] In an independent study comparing different image-based species recognition models and their suitability for recognizing invasive alien species, the plant.id achieved the highest accuracy compared to other tools.[13] In a subsequent study, plant.id was utilized to evaluate urban forest biodiversity using remote-sensing imagery, achieving the highest accuracy in tree species identification among compared methods.[8]
Research activities
Flowerchecker cooperates with the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic on a biodiversity mapping project.[4]
FlowerChecker plans to adapt its services to participate in the control of invasive species. In 2022, the company entered a consortium to develop a weeder capable of in-row weed detection and removal.[14]
