The problem I am trying to solve : A new hope for snails.

So I am trying to work on a process of identifying snails in a picture.

Why am I trying to do this? I want to create an alert when a Snail appears on my plants so I can go out and remove it before it eats all the leaves.. No seriously, I know I could be solving bigger issues but this seemed like a good place to start.

But I don't want to use pesticides in my garden and I have great patch at the back of the garden that the snails can happily eat so I spend some time picking up snails and relocating them to this home...Yes I know that is slight madness..

So I took some pictures of a snail in locations and some without in my gardening they look roughly like this:

So ideally my program would give me a tag of snail .

So before I decided to use anything else I looked at third party solutions, I decided I would try some programs that were already out there. Why build when maybe someone has already nailed the snail issue.

Quick Google: Image recognition

AWS Rekognition
Results from AWS Rekonition:   https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/


Very impressive, but no snail, I was though super impressed.


clarifai https://www.clarifai.com/



Again these are very impressive, when you consider the picture I sent, but still no snail.

Google Vision  https://cloud.google.com/vision/



So like any solid person I stopped there...Yeah I know.. Well to be honest I wanted to try and solve this problem with Tensorflow https://www.tensorflow.org/ and try Meta Mind https://metamind.io/ .

If I was in some sort of production world I would have probably looked at greater depth for other solutions.

I would encourage anyone to try these services and I will probably run basic a blog on how to get started with all three in the future.  But if anyone has any further suggestions for services to try I am happy to give them a go and post here.

So this is the problem I am trying to solve.