AI4Food-NutritionFW: A Novel Framework for the Automatic Synthesis and Analysis of Eating Behaviours

Abstract

Leading a healthy lifestyle significantly reduces the risk of developing Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD). However, defining and monitoring healthy eating behaviour depends on multiple factors and usually requires the intervention of experts. On the other hand, nowadays millions of images are shared on social media and web platforms. In particular, many of them are food images taken from a smartphone over time, providing information related to the individual's diet. Consequently, exploiting recent advances in image processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), this scenario represents an excellent opportunity to: i) create new methods that analyse the individuals' health from what they eat, and ii) develop personalised recommendations to improve nutrition and diet under specific circumstances (e.g., obesity or COVID). This article introduces the AI4Food-NutritionFW, a framework that facilitates the creation of food image datasets tailored to configurable eating behaviours. The framework considers various aspects such as region and lifestyle, simulating a user-friendly scenario where individuals capture food images using their smartphones. The study also presents a novel food image dataset comprising 4,800 diverse weekly diets from 15 distinct profiles, ranging from healthy eating habits to unhealthy ones. Finally, we evaluate the healthy eating behaviours through a score based on the Normalised Mahalanobis Distance (NMD), achieving promising results (99.53% and 99.60% accuracy and sensitivity, respectively). We also release to the research community a software implementation of our proposed AI4Food-NutritionFW (https://github.com/BiDAlab/AI4Food-NutritionFW) and the mentioned food image dataset created with it.