Food photo recognition for dietary tracking: System and experiment

Abstract

Tracking dietary intake is an important task for health management especially for chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Given the popularity of personal hand-held devices, mobile applications provide a promising low-cost solution to tackle the key risk factor by diet monitoring. In this work, we propose a photo based dietary tracking system that employs deep-based image recognition algorithms to recognize food and analyze nutrition. The system is beneficial for patients to manage their dietary and nutrition intake, and for the medical institutions to intervene and treat the chronic diseases. To the best of our knowledge, there are no popular applications in the market that provide a high-performance food photo recognition like ours, which is more convenient and intuitive to enter food than textual typing. We conducted experiments on evaluating the recognition accuracy on laboratory data and real user data on Singapore local food, which shed light on uplifting lab trained image recognition models in real applications. In addition, we have conducted user study to verify that our proposed method has the potential to foster higher user engagement rate as compared to existing apps based dietary tracking approaches.