A floral rainbow, annotated by Google
May 9th, 2015 at 6:10 pm (Plants)
A couple of weeks ago, I was walking to the library and I was struck by so many beautiful flowers along the way in people’s yards and gardens. I decided to collect a few and share them here. (Click for bigger versions of each.)
Then I thought I would try out Google image search on each one to see if it could identify each flower by finding a match within the first 10 hits (in some cases I looked through many more than that, hoping to find a match, but it seems that if it isn’t in the first 10 then it isn’t going to find it).
Red passion flower. Google: failure (not found in the top 10 hits).
California poppy. Google: hit #5. Success!
Orange lily. Google: hit #1!
Probably some kind of daisy. Google: could not find an exact match.
Google: failure. Closest match is a “balloon flower” which has pointy petals (these are rounded).
Google: failure. I think their image search is only looking at color distributions rather than shape features. Object identification is hard! (Does anyone know what this is?)
Cape mallow (or some other kind of mallow). Google: hit #10. Barely snuck it in there!
Google score: 4 of 7. I guess we still need flower identification handbooks. And humans! :)
Cindy said,
May 20, 2015 at 4:19 am
Hi – I’m not sure what search I was doing that I found your page, but I love flowers and I try to learn as many new ones as I can so this entry intriqued me. Number 5 I think is a member of the orchid family-can’t tell if that middle piece is a petal not yet unfurled though. Defnitely a toughie, but I feel 99.9% sure of orchid and thought orchid when I first saw it. Depends on the area of the country too. Number 3 is probably a gazania, from the leaves and the flowers. Beautiful pictures!