To which extent can the ai, computer vision assist in distinguish annotations e.g. āroad killā, āimagoā, āLarveā, āCaterpillarā?, ājuvenielā, āadultā āmaleā āfemaleā
Sex annotation : I think CV might be able to do sex annotation in species with high amounts of sexual dimorphism. But with species that have little or no sexual dimorphism i think it would be impossible for the CV to annotate correctly.
Life stage : Most species you can easily do life stage annotations, for example moths is (egg - larva (caterpillar) - moth). With those types of species i think CV could be very useful, as life stage annotations take up time that could be used for other annotations.
Plant phenology : Most plant species that i have encountered are easy to determine if it is flowering, fruiting, flower budding or no evidence of flowering so in these species i think CV could be very useful.
Summary : CV would be useful in āeasyā species, but in āharderā species it would quickly become useless.
Note 1 : identifiers would have to ātrainā the CV with atleast a few hundred observations so that it can reliably annotate.
Note 2 : even if the CV only can annotate easy species, it would save a lot of time for annotators to focus on harder species.
The iNaturalist Annotation Effort has finished its first moth species today! the species is called āArge Mothā and it has 984 observations on iNat.
Results :
Arge moths are most frequently observed in May
There is roughly 10x more adult observations then larva observations Doris tiger moths are sometimes misidentified as Arge moth
Stats :
Adult : 894
Larva : 85
Misidentifications found : 13
Annotation time : 2 days (This means we finished all Arge moth observations 2 days after we started the species)
User(s) on species : 1
Iāve been thinking recently about how important and useful annotation isā¦ and I was wondering whether it would be possible to list annotators the way we list observers and identifiers?
We could certainly train a computer vision model to predict annotations like life stage rather than species. But remember to train the model, weāll still need lots of training data so the more life stage annotations you can add the better the model will be
We could certainly train a computer vision model to predict annotations like life stage rather than species. But remember to train the model, weāll still need lots of training data so the more life stage annotations you can add the better the model will be
Instead of quoting me and editing the words, quote from the right person - The first quote is from a staff member called loarie the second quote is from tiwane.
You can quote from another forum thread and putting it here by copy pasting the quote.
Should we change the iNaturalist Annotation Effortās goal from āAnnotating entire speciesā to āEducating people on annotating, misidentifications, etcā
This would mean instead of focusing entirely on annotating, we will try to educate people on how to identify and correct misidentifications in similar species, and we will also try to educate people on the importance of annotating.
We would still be annotating, but the project would be leaning towards education.
We will also rename the project to āiNaturalist Annotation & Educationā if project priorities are changed
Edit : Poll is closed, Project priorities have changed and the project is renamed to āiNaturalist Annotation & Educationā
If you do rename I would spell out
Annotation & Education.
You know what your A and E are, but each new person wonāt.
PS you can drop āprojectā tho.
The project is now focusing on Misidentifications instead of Annotations. The reasons we are doing this is because (1) Annotations are important, But there are so many misidentifications that pollute the research-grade observations and (2) Generally Misidentifications are more important to fix then annotations
Click Here for commonly misidentified taxa and how to fix them. Plus we provide keys if we have them.
Please keep in mind that we do not have information on every species, if you know a species that is misidentified, let me know and I will add it
Update on project, 2/8/2023 : I have added 18 plant guides and 4 insect guides (Click Here) to the project, Please let me know if you have a link to a guide that is not in the project
Hey folks, the forum isnāt a place for specific project discussions like this, Iām sorry. If it was, then pretty much any project could use it as such and it would be unmanageable. Iāve unlisted this topic and set it to close in two days.
Some options you might consider for project-specific discussions: