Spring is always a good time to enjoy blooming flowers. But can you correctly identify peach flowers, apricot flowers and cherry blossoms?
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Don’t worry. Mobile apps now can tell you the answer within three seconds. Simply upload a photo of a flower and get an answer that is 90 percent accurate.
AI-powered mobile app identifies a flower for its user.
Chen Mingquan, founder of the flora recognition service Xingse, said his app can identify more than 4,000 species of plants now. “On average 500,000 pictures are uploaded every day when the weather is good. It is a huge number. We have 10 million pictures in total, surpassing the largest plant data in the world by six million.”
The accuracy of the app's answers depend to a large extent on the quality of photos users send, the angle the shots are taken, and the lighting.
Screenshot of mobile flower recognition app
The app may seem simple, but the brain behind it is cutting-edge. It uses deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) technology, similar to the Google-developed AlphaGo computer.
“We created a model which allows the computer to learn by itself. The process is similar to the learning activity of human brains, from zero to one,” said Chen Mingquan.
This means that the computer gets better at its job as users send in more photos of flowers.
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Yan Yan, chief technology officer of Beijing-based Senscape, said AI has been used in voice and facial recognition, smart home applications, and driverless cars. “Can AI totally replace human beings? I think we are still far away,” Yan said.
Consultancy firm iResearch estimates that the global AI market is expected to be worth 120 billion yuan (17 billion US dollars) by 2020, and China will make up about 9.1 billion yuan (about 1.3 billion US dollars) of that total.
