[navark]

I have an acre of forest and I spend time removing invasive species like buckthorn and wild mustard to keep the forest healthy. It can be really challenging to discriminate between native and invasive plants without a lot of experience and plant identifying apps like iNaturalist. I would love to be able to sweep my phone around and have it highlight invasive plants live. Is anyone working on something like this? The technology already works in images of a single plant, I just need to identify multiple plants in one frame, and ideally live video.

[jamiek88]

What a brilliant idea!

To Xcode i go!

And I now have an excuse for a new M4 Mac mini.

You’re a genius Navark!

[bluerooibos]

This would be awesome - live video stream with some ChatGPT voice commentary on what you're seeing, though I imagine this won't be super simple...

You could also extend it to just tell you the fauna and species of grass in your field etc. I've been looking at mapping a field at my home before starting a permaculture project on it, so a tool like this would be super useful. Image upload would be fine instead of a live video.

[jihadjihad]

Haha I hope you're serious. Looking forward to the Show HN soon.

[jamiek88]

I already have a path forward, boy some of these ML and vision apis are incredible. What a force multiplier it is being able to piggy back on a multi trillion dollar corps work! :)

[sgt101]

Yeah - be a little careful there.

I've been playing with llama-3.2vision-11b and it can't count more than 4 dots.

[jamiek88]

I’m not using an LLM I’m using apples vision frameworks.

Which makes way more sense to me as this needs to run on device.

[navark]

I am looking forward to your attempt!

[mschild]

Doesn't iNaturalist provide an app called Seek that does exactly that? I remember using it in the past to scan plants and it would clarify them for you as best as it could.

[sn9]

Have you tried renting some goats?

Not sure if they'll preferentially target the plants you want gone, but could save on labor.