I am a fairly new user to iNaturalist. I am interested in the efficacy of the Computer Vision in comparison to user comment identifications and my identifications for the same specimens. I have a couple outstanding questions about Computer Vision that I have had a difficult time tracking down. Firs…

The observations towards the top are the more likely identifications.

CV only looks at first photo in observation; yes, first suggestions are more likely to be true according to cv. Anyway you should add only those ids you’re sure in, you can see cv can be very correct in close “regular for the taxon” photos and can be awful for a new angle on an object or just have c…

[image] Cen_Bamper: is the first identification (identification suggested at the top) the most likely identification? They should be ranked by visual similarity - eg the photo being analyzed is the most visually similar to the taxon at the top, but cruicially this is only among taxa in the mo…

[image] Cen_Bamper: Second, when combing multiple photos for a single observation (e.g., 3 photos of the same lizard), how does this impact the algorithm’s suggested identifications? If suggested identification ranking matters (from the first paragraph), then does the algorithm combine suggested…

[image] chrisangell: You only get suggestions for one photo, by default the first one. In the Android app (though not on the website, currently), you can scroll from photo to photo and see the suggestions for each one. On the website, what I’ve done with observations that I can’t get good sug…

[image] tiwane: They should be ranked by visual similarity while visual similarity is the main component of the scores/rankings, my understanding is that location does factor into the rankings slightly. specifically, taxa with nearby observations will get a slight boost in their rankings, and…

As a couple of other users have said, the CV only looks at the first pic if you have multiple pics. If you have a couple of pics from different angles, you can manually reorder them so as to check the CV suggestion for each pic in turn. I’ve found that if it suggests the same top species each time, …

[image] Cen_Bamper: if I post a photo of a lizard Computer Vision is a tool (one of multiple), and how you use it in this case depends on circumstances. Are you familiar with lizards? Can you (or better yet, have you) identified species of lizards? Have you seen this particular lizard before?…

Thank you all for your responses. They very helpful and have sparked a couple more questions as I think through my goals for understanding the efficacy of CV vs. my ID vs. community commentary. If I upload three photos of the same lizard (i.e., listing them in the same individual observation) and t…

The CV is not trained by location, all the photos from a species are lumped together. The CV may train on multiple photos from the same observation, but if it has many photos of a species (>1000), it won’t use all of them and will pull randomly from the pool of photos of that taxon.

iNaturalist Computer Vision Ranking and Combined Observations

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Use computer vision on each photo in an observation Feature Requests web , under-review	48	3559	December 15, 2025
Workings of iNat Artificial Intelligence (AI) aka Computer Vision (CV) General	28	2514	March 16, 2022
Computer Vision should tell us how sure it is of its suggestions Feature Requests web , mobile-app	62	7484	October 11, 2024
Learning more about iNat's computer vision General question	9	2241	June 17, 2019
Question about characterizing Computer Vision General question	10	306	October 6, 2024

iNaturalist Computer Vision Ranking and Combined Observations

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