Flower-Power Needs Your Help
The Departments of Plant Science and Engineering at the University of Oxford in collaboration with BSBI, Natural England and Field Studies Council wish to explore the efficiency of digital recognition software for identifying UK flowering plants through photographs of their flowers (Flower-Power). The final outcome of the project being, at the very least, a mobile phone app to identify UK flowering plants. The first part of the project involves gathering and assembling a minimum of 40 photographs per species to allow the relevant software to build up a ‘picture’ of the variation of photographs taken at different light intensities and angles. We plan to begin assembling the photographs in April 2015 with a view to implementing, if possible, the digital recognition part of the project by the beginning of 2016. There is a website for uploading images:
We require quality photographs but Images with width or height of a 1000 pixels are fine (if the site is too slow when uploading).
Once uploaded there is a second website to view images:
At the moment we have approximately 3000 images (largely thanks to Lliam Rooney) but require a total of 60,000, i.e. 1450 native UK flowering plants x 40 minimum. The uploading site is self-explanatory BUT we strongly encourage you to please read the guidelines for what is and is not a suitable photograph. Any queries or problems encountered can be sent to Oxford via the site. Any other queries can be directed to robert.scotland@plants.ox.ac.uk
