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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Building a plant or object identifier app: a well-scoped vision project

#vision #project #classification

A plant or object identification app — photograph something, get back what it is — is a well-scoped, visually compelling student project achievable without training a model from scratch.

A realistic build

  1. Start with a pretrained image classification or embedding model, not a from-scratch architecture.
  2. Build (or find) a well-curated reference dataset for the category you're identifying, with clean labelled examples.
  3. Use similarity search against the reference set (via embeddings) rather than a fixed closed-set classifier, so new categories can be added without retraining.
  4. Show a confidence score and a few alternative matches, not just one guess — this is more honest and more useful when the model is uncertain.

What makes this project stand out

Handling the 'I don't know' case gracefully — recognising low confidence and saying so — is the detail that separates a genuinely useful demo from a toy that always confidently guesses something.

See image embeddings for visual search.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour in a suit and tie with a lanyard at a formal campus event
At a formal campus event

Portrait of Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, wearing wire-frame glasses
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting on stage in a blue polo, with his Annapurna demo video on the screen behind him
Presenting Annapurna on stage

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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