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

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. On the other hand, eating behaviours are directly related to some of the most prevalent diseases in the world. 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). Having tunable tools for creating food image datasets that facilitate research in both lines is very much needed. This paper proposes AI4Food-NutritionFW, a framework for the creation of food image datasets according to configurable eating behaviours. AI4Food-NutritionFW simulates a user-friendly and widespread scenario where images are taken using a smartphone. In addition to the framework, we also provide and describe a unique food image dataset that includes 4,800 different weekly eating behaviours from 15 different profiles and 1,200 subjects. Specifically, we consider profiles that comply with actual lifestyles from healthy eating behaviours (according to established knowledge), variable profiles (e.g., eating out, holidays), to unhealthy ones (e.g., excess of fast food or sweets). Finally, we automatically evaluate a healthy index of the subject's eating behaviours using multidimensional metrics based on guidelines for healthy diets proposed by international organisations, 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 and the mentioned food image dataset created with it.

AI4Food-NutritionDB: Food Image Database, Nutrition Taxonomy, and Recognition Benchmark

Leading a healthy lifestyle has become one of the most challenging goals in today's society due to our sedentary lifestyle and poor eating habits. As a result, national and international organisms have made numerous efforts to promote healthier food diets and physical activity habits. However, these recommendations are sometimes difficult to follow in our daily life and they are also based on a general population. As a consequence, a new area of research, personalised nutrition, has been conceived focusing on individual solutions through smart devices and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. This study presents the AI4Food-NutritionDB database, the first nutrition database that considers food images and a nutrition taxonomy based on recommendations by national and international organisms. In addition, four different categorisation levels are considered following nutrition experts: 6 nutritional levels, 19 main categories (e.g., "Meat"), 73 subcategories (e.g., "White Meat"), and 893 final food products (e.g., "Chicken"). The AI4Food-NutritionDB opens the doors to new food computing approaches in terms of food intake frequency, quality, and categorisation. Also, in addition to the database, we propose a standard experimental protocol and benchmark including three tasks based on the nutrition taxonomy (i.e., category, subcategory, and final product) to be used for the research community. Finally, we also release our Deep Learning models trained with the AI4Food-NutritionDB, which can be used as pre-trained models, achieving accurate recognition results with challenging food image databases.