In particular, know how to identify the common and deadly species (eg: much of the genus Amanita) yourself, and get multiple trustworthy field guides for your part of the world.
In particular, know how to identify the common and deadly species (eg: much of the genus Amanita) yourself, and get multiple trustworthy field guides for your part of the world.
I feel like training on poisonous mushrooms is the wrong direction. You want to err on the side of poisonous, not edible. Anything it can’t identify should be considered poisonous.
Many edible mushrooms have poisonous look-alikes, so your approach would be likely to misidentify those poisonous look-alikes - a potentially deadly mistake.
For example - from https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/types-of-edible-mushrooms-their-poisonous-look-alikes
It would be easy to train an ML model to confidently identify any of those as morels if you only trained on morels.
The idea is to train on both so it’s less likely to mistake a poisonous mushroom for an edible one, and to then “hedge” your bet anyway, by always presenting the poisonous look-alikes first.
The most dangerous scenario with this app is also the most useful - a user who has some training in mushroom identification uses the app as a quick way to look up a mushroom they think is a particular edible mushroom, notes that the mushroom they think it is is within the list, then reviews the list of poisonous look-alikes, and then applies their training to rule out those look-alikes. Finally they confirm that they cannot rule out the edible mushroom.
The risks here are that