A floral rainbow, annotated by Google

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).

IMG_2007
Red passion flower. Google: failure (not found in the top 10 hits).

IMG_2011
California poppy. Google: hit #5. Success!

IMG_2015
Orange lily. Google: hit #1!

IMG_2014
Probably some kind of daisy. Google: could not find an exact match.

IMG_2012
Google: failure. Closest match is a “balloon flower” which has pointy petals (these are rounded).

IMG_2010
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?)

IMG_2008
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! :)

1 Comment
1 of 1 people learned something from this entry.

  1. Cindy said,

    May 20, 2015 at 4:19 am

    (Learned something new!)

    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!

Post a Comment

I knew this already. I learned something new!