this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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On android you can use an app called "PlantNet" to take a picture of a plant and find out what it is. I've learned about many of the plants growing around me this way and have found new edible things. Garlic mustard is a good example. It's invasive but edible and pretty good, so eating it is also protecting local ecology.
Please do not consume plants based on a visual ID by a convolutional neural network. It’s a dangerous and fundamentally flawed approach. Many plants can only be properly identified by observing specific parts that don’t turn out from a single angle photo, such as formations on the underside of leaves, or a specific curl direction of a flower stamen etc. etc.
Well, yeah if you want to eat something you want to be sure. Even if you only take one photo, you can look at pictures of the leaves, flowers, and fruit. There's a link to other sources, like Wikipedia, where you can get more info.
The app allows you to take several photos, label those parts ("leaves", "flower", etc.), and then you get several results, sorted by correspondence according to the neural network. When you click on a result, you get photos of different parts of the plant, allowing you to compare to your plant and judge if they're the same.
In now this app and I use it but I agree with the previous comment. PlantNet should be an aid. One among many clue helping you getting the ability to recognis on your own which plant it is. Then we you don't need PlantNet to recognise the plant 200 % and to say "It can only be this plant because of Z, of Y and also of X", only then you should eat it.
Otherwise, your playing with fire. That is your health and potentially your life.