Question

Why has visual food recognition become popular? What do you think can be extracted using visual approaches about food for health? Do you think this is going to work?

Answer 1

"One cannot think well,love well, sleep well if one has not dined well. "

- Virginia Woolf

Food is one of the basic need of very human being. The visual image of food increases the appetite of an individual is its appearance is good and well organized. It is not only necessary to take food on time but also the quantity of food intake should be balanced to stay healthy. When cooking in kitchen we only concentrate preparing the food delicious and the amount, color and texture of food. We never tend to calculate the amount of nutrients that the cooked meal have.

The visual recognition of food has become popular because

• it identifies the food items from the image captured by a camera enabled device.
• This device is trained to identify and categorize the individual food item from the plate from a single image. If multiple image is taken then the volume can be estimated.
• It estimates the food portion and volume by generating a 3D reconstruction of plate in combination with food identification information.
• Basing on estimation of food quantity, it calculates the nutritional values of the food and generate a FDA label.

Food recognition tells us how healthy is our food. Thus the visual approaches about food will not only provide us the nutrient value of food but also it will help us to find out the deficiencies in diet and thereby help in reducing the food intake related disease.

This idea of food recognition model is not only good for healthy diet,cooking and recipes but also perfect for business too. It can increase the revenue of hotels, restaurants other travel and hospitality industry. Therefore the concept of visual food recognition should be incorporated in all areas which deals with FOODS.