What the Succulent?

Have you ever struggled to identify what plant you have? We certainly have. Now, you can upload an image of your plant and we'll identify it using the power of machine learning.

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Inspiration

We love collecting plants, especially succulents! We wanted to create a website to help others identify their mystery plants and to provide some general advice on how to take care of them.

What it does

Under the Identification tab, simply upload a picture (or two) of your plant. Allow a few moments for the Plant.id API to retrieve pictures of plants that are visually similar to yours. Then, the table will be populated with suggestions of plant names, the likelihood that each suggestion is correct, and corresponding images from the dataset that you can compare against your own. If results do not match your picture, try taking photographs from different angles. Voila! You now know what plant you have.

Under the Plant Care tab, play some quick mini-games to learn if your plant is under-watered, over-watered, or healthy. Also, learn about the absorption spectra of plants and optimum lighting situations.

How we built it

We used the Plant.id API, which returned a list of suggested plants and other related info. The front-end of the website was designed with Bootstrap, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we tried using Google Cloud Vision, but Google Cloud was unable to identify the type of plant. For example, we uploaded a picture of a Golden Pothos, but the output was "plant," not "pothos" or "golden pothos." Therefore, we had to switch to use a different API designed specifically for plant identification.

With Plant.id, the API call returned a JSON object, so we had to learn how to access the appropriate fields and populate the table with the information.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was Mayleen's first hackathon and she's proud that she completed a project! It was Ellyn's first time incorporating an API into a website and she's excited that it worked.

What we learned

We learned about plants, Google Cloud (and its limitations), how to use an API, and how to use Bootstrap.

What's next for What the Succulent?

We’d like to add a database of photos so that users can refer back to the plants they’ve previously identified. It'd also be lovely to expand the Plant Care tab to provide more plant advice and mini-games.

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