Question: Does this app exist?

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nofangs
Posts: 4
Joined: June 26th, 2011, 10:08 am
Location: Texas

Question: Does this app exist?

Post by nofangs »

Does anyone know if there is an app that can give information on scale counts or head dimension measurements from a photograph. A friend who is a high school biology teacher told me that there used to be a program that compared skull shapes, scale counts and other information from a photograph.

From what she told me, I am assuming you could get information on specie differentiation based on a photograph. Does anyone know if there is an app out there that can do this? This would be helpful to differentiate species or even help discover new species quickly.

R
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technoendo
Posts: 112
Joined: December 13th, 2014, 5:27 pm

Re: Question: Does this app exist?

Post by technoendo »

hrm hrm, I'm not exactly sure what this is.

I've been gathering footage to make a video testing the accuracy between tape measurements and photo + software measurement tools, but that is completely unrelated to what you want. These involve dropping a reference object like a legal sheet of paper or ruler on a flat surface with a snake, taking a photo of both together, opening the image in software and tracing a line along the spine of the animal, and the software tries to provide a length.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/snakemt/

http://serpwidgets.com/main/measure

There are some AI tools out there to try and assist in identifications of animals by using photographs, however these usually provide probabilities that an animal is a match (%percentages) and not things like scale counts. This tool is quite good and rather spooky how it seems to nail the identifications even when I try and trick it (wasn't fooled by a clarus phase long-nosed snake).

http://whattheherp.com/

Ok, here's something I hadn't seen before. If you get a shed and count the scales in a particular way, and provide those scale counts to this site, it will tell you what australian snake it is. The technique "scale count search" does appear on an iOS app to aid identification of australian snakes. Still though not seeing these tools get scale counts from images in a more automated fashion...

http://www.arod.com.au/arod/scale/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snakes- ... 03346?mt=8

Sorry I can't find the software you are looking for but I'd love to hear more about it if its real.
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