The American Computer Museum has named Computer Science Professor Peter Belhumeur winner of the 2011 Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award for co-creating LeafSnap, an electronic field guide for iPhones and iPads that identifies trees. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.
Leafsnap contains high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. It currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.
Belhumeur’s app has generated tremendous media attention, including from the New York Times, NPR, the major television networks and numerous print and online publications around the world.
Belhumeur, who also directs Columbia’s Laboratory for the Study of Visual Appearance, has worked on facial recognition since the mid-1990s. In a Columbia News story in May, he said he quickly saw that the same algorithms that can process the curve of an eyebrow or the angle of a cheekbone could be applied to the shape of a leaf.
“The idea of building classifiers that say, ‘Is this person in the photo a man or a woman?’ or ‘Is that leaf a sugar maple or a silver maple?’ uses a lot of the same sort of math and technology,” he said.
The award, which honors individuals who have significantly contributed to the preservation of biodiversity on Earth, will be presented in October by Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, a biologist recognized worldwide as the Father of Biodiversity, in a public forum of 2,500 individuals in Bozeman, Montana. The co-recipients are Belhumeur’s collaborators, John Kress, a research botanist and curator with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and David Jacobs, computer science professor at the University of Maryland.
Photo and article from Columbia Engineering
