There are two things happening:
- When we released the last model update, we made a small mention that
“Cropping Change” is a slight modification to the way images are prepared before they are sent to the CV model that resulted in an average 2.1% improvement.
This is the center cropping that you correctly deduced. The previous method was basically a “squish” that can distort proportions (e.g. make an elongated leaf look like a wide one).
- The iOS app has been oddly resizing very small images (i.e. manually cropped to focus on something small in the original photo), which wasn’t a big problem before, but in combination with the new server-side cropping, has recently resulted in some way off species suggestions. We should have a fix out soon. (@alex please correct me if I didn’t describe this accurately.)