Fast food recognition from videos of eating for calorie estimation

Accurate and passive acquisition of dietary data from patients is essential for a better understanding of the etiology of obesity and development of effective weight management programs. Self-reporting is currently the main method for such data acquisition. However, studies have shown that data obtained by self-reporting seriously underestimate food intake and thus do not accurately reflect the real habitual behavior of individuals. Computer food recognition programs have not yet been developed. In this paper, we present a study for recognizing foods from videos of eating, which are directly recorded in restaurants by a web camera. From recognition results, our method then estimates food calories of intake. We have evaluated our method on a database of 101 foods from 9 food restaurants in USA and obtained promising results.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICMCS
• Authors: Wen Wu, Jie Yang
• Keywords: Computer Food Recognition, Effective Weight Management, ICMCS 2009, Multimedia, Real Habitual Behavior