After a fair bit of graft we’ve finished our first product using StrongSteam – a Latin Botanical Garden label matcher (AKA “OpenPlants”) which runs at Kew Gardens, Wakehurst Place and other botanical gardens in Europe that use the usual black rectangular labels. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then these 30 second demo videos should make it clear:
Update – I totally should have added that we built this app in partnership with Kasabi using their DBPedia dataset.
Update – a screencast showing how the API can match a photo from the London Science Museum‘s energy hall (with ‘Beelzebub’!) to the right web page is available.
As you can see you photograph the plant label, we use optical character recognition to read what’s on the sign and then we bring back relevant information from wikipedia about the Family and Genus including pictures and links to other resources. We’ll launch this as a free app in a few weeks.
Seeing as StrongSteam is a cloud based API it makes sense to show it being used from another platform. Here’s a screencast showing a webcam on a Linux laptop taking a photograph of a printed plant label using our Python API which is uploaded and recognised, with the results being shown in the local web browser:
We’ll launch the alpha OCR API for developers in April. Add your email to the email list on our homepage to get an announce. Once the iPhone app is available we’ll also announce it here.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.