Spring 2025
Lepidoptica
Lepidoptica is the senior project that led me to graduation. The project instructed my team of four to find an instructor at the University of Florida (UF) to act as a our advisor, then craft and develop a program on their behalf. On our search for an advisor, we found Keith Willmott, instructor at UF and Curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera & Biodiversity (basically he knows all about butterflies and moths).
We asked him what would be a project idea that his Center would find useful. He showed us the museum's database full of butterfly and moth specimen photos. Each photo included the butterfly itself, a color chart, the scientific name, gender, museum tag, and more notes specifying information about the specimen. Willmott's problem is that everything written in these thousands of photos need to be electronically documented in text writing, but it's a long, tedious process. Not only that, but a lot of the notes are handwritten and very old, making them illegible to human eyes.
My team developed a solution using a combination of a Python webapp and Easy OCR text model made in Google Colab that can begin to translate handwritten words into text and sort them into categories. The output can then be downloaded and imported into the museum's database for easy use.
