Wood Variety Recognition on Mobile Devices

The traditional method of identifying wood species involves manual browsing through digital wooden veneer catalogues and making a subjective judgement. This is labour intensive, and concentration problems can lead to errors. Additionally, gradual changes and changing shades due to variable light conditions are difficult for humans to detect. As an alternative, we aimed to develop an application to identify wood species using a smartphone camera, which returns the resulting species name and a corresponding high quality database wood specimen image. This computer-aided wood identification system retrieves a wood template from a digital wood database, selecting that which most closely resembles the query sample.