Estimation of the attractiveness of food photography based on image features

Abstract

We introduce a method to estimate the attractiveness of a food photo. It extracts image features focusing on the appearances of 1) the entire food, and 2) the main ingredients. To estimate the attractiveness of an arbitrary food photo, these features are integrated in a regression scheme. We also constructed and released a food image dataset composed of images of ten food categories taken from 36 angles and accompanied with attractiveness values. Evaluation results showed the effectiveness of integrating the two kinds of image features.