Backyard Expedition App
The museum often receives many emails and messages from individuals who believe they've found a fossil in their area. Though the odds are low for such a "backyard" find, there's always a real possibility an actual fossil has been found! Currently the only avenue for this service is to contact Carl Mehling via email at [email protected].
The goal is to create a system that can teach people about fossil identification, manage the flow of messages to the museum, and possibly even help distinguish real discoveries from just another rock. The two primary things fossil experts look for are: (1) where the fossils are from (not necessarily where the photo was taken / geotagged); and (2) a well focused image. Having a scale in the photo is good, but is not a requirement. Paleontologists believe it would be very challenging to identify whether an object is a fossil or not without a pair of human eyes. That said, it would still be great to learn from experts on image processing and machine learning whether automated identification is possible. The two docs here provide a good sampling of photos of fossils and pseudofossils.
Sample text for users: "Thanks for submitting your specimen! We'd be happy to have a look at your find. Please take very sharp photos (no more than 5 photos that are no larger than 500k each) that show scale (place a ruler or coin beside the specimen in the photo). Please note that we do not perform appraisals on specimens and cannot tell you the value of a fossil."
- Build a mobile app that allows an individual to take a photo, geotag it, describe what they found and how they found it, easily enter other relevant data, and submit to the museum. (Don't forget to tell users to include a ruler for scale)
- Build a web app system that allows the museum to examine, curate, and feature submissions via a web page ("Backyard Find Of The Week"?) and add some text to explain why it is or isn't a fossil.
- Use sentiment analysis on language of a message from an individual to determine whether or not a fossil could be real?
- Image recognition to compare actual fossils to non-fossils?
- Use other factors to weight the possibility of an actual fossil: latitude / longitude (certain areas are more likely to have fossils), et cetera
- Existing Fossil Submission Page: Contains content, images
- Images from submissions - image file names correspond to ID field in data files and identify fossil status in photo (Yes, No, Maybe). For example, a file containing 2 images where one is a fossil and one may be a fossil: 1a_Y.jpg, 1b_M.jpg
- Submission data file 1 - contains email text of submissions and responses
- Submission data file 2 - contains more email text of submissions and responses
- List of areas more likely to contain fossils
