An Algorithm to Identify Every Tree
Science Friday (January 9, 2017)
Stop for a second and look out your window. You’ll likely see a tree somewhere outside. Do you know its species? How often should it be watered? Is it healthy?
Pietro Perona imagines a world where you could look at a tree—or myriad other objects—and, with the help of a smartphone, gain instant expertise about it. While you may not know anything about the item, “someone will know what it is,” says Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). “And if someone knows, [your] iPhone should be able to know as well.”
He doesn’t mean that you’ll just ask Google or Siri. Rather, you’d take a photo of the object—take the tree, for example—and an algorithm used in an app or a website would be able to recognize it by comparing your image to data collected on a variety of tree species. Perona envisions this type of algorithm working for millions of other observable things, from plants and animals to geological formations—even various health-related symptoms, like skin rashes.
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