Snap a Picture, log your meal: An AI-powered App “FoodTracker”
- Admin
- Oct 22, 2019
- 2 min read
Oct. 17, 2019
A research team at McGill University in Canada outlined a new mobile application, called FoodTracker, in a recent paper pre-published on arXiv and presented at the 16th International Conference on Machine Vision Applications in Tokyo.
Could you imagine only take a picture of your plate and track your food and calorie intake every day? “Free and low-cost weight loss apps have changed the ways that Americans manage their weight,” says Gary Bennet, a psychology professor at Duke University. With advancements in AI technology, machine learning and image recognition, people use a new mobile application to keep their figures and improve their health.
Food Tracker
FoodTracker is a tool for real-time food recognition and for providing useful nutrition-related guidance. Users use their Smartphones to take a picture of a meal in their plates, and this app can rapidly detect ingredients in plates and tell users how much nutrition they consume in this meal.
How Does It Work?
Firstly, the research team developed a model that combines a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with YOLO, a state-of-the-art detection strategy. Then, they trained the model by using a huge database of food images. The result shows that it can detect food items with an average precision. Subsequently, they integrated this model into the FoodTracker, with embedding an additional feature for nutrition analysis.
Differently from any other food tracking app, the key advantage of FoodTracker is that it can achieve automatic food monitoring and nutrition analysis, only based on images from mobile cameras. In other words, this app runs by itself, so users do not have to key in additional data. Take a picture of food that you eat, and you can get a list of nutrition information about the meal you eat in a short time.
The Future of AI-powered Apps
Since the rise in obesity rates and issues about poor nutrition intake in countries worldwide, many mobile applications related to nutrition and health have been constantly developed by researchers who hope to promote a good and healthy lifestyle.
In the future, more and more mobile applications like FoodTracker will come out. These apps can help people to be aware of the food they consume in daily life, and broaden their knowledge about nutrition.
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