Deep Learning-Based Food Calorie Estimation Method in Dietary Assessment

Obesity treatment requires obese patients to record all food intakes per day. Computer vision has been introduced to estimate calories from food images. In order to increase accuracy of detection and reduce the error of volume estimation in food calorie estimation, we present our calorie estimation method in this paper. To estimate calorie of food, a top view and side view is needed. Faster R-CNN is used to detect the food and calibration object. GrabCut algorithm is used to get each food's contour. Then the volume is estimated with the food and corresponding object. Finally we estimate each food's calorie. And the experiment results show our estimation method is effective.

Computer vision-based food calorie estimation: dataset, method, and experiment

Computer vision has been introduced to estimate calories from food images. But current food image data sets don't contain volume and mass records of foods, which leads to an incomplete calorie estimation. In this paper, we present a novel food image data set with volume and mass records of foods, and a deep learning method for food detection, to make a complete calorie estimation. Our data set includes 2978 images, and every image contains corresponding each food's annotation, volume and mass records, as well as a certain calibration reference. To estimate calorie of food in the proposed data set, a deep learning method using Faster R-CNN first is put forward to detect the food. And the experiment results show our method is effective to estimate calories and our data set contains adequate information for calorie estimation. Our data set is the first released food image data set which can be used to evaluate computer vision-based calorie estimation methods.