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Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

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Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#111

Post by hokkos »

subcosmos wrote: post #102
solaxun wrote: post #83

I've been thinking of this exact thing for a few years now, good to see others are interested too. I think there is HUGE potential for an app that can accurately (within a reasonable error range) count macro-nutrients through pictures of food, but I think that is WAY more difficult than you would imagine. How can you train a classifier to tell how much butter is in a dish? How can you account for food that is literal…

Another angle is post-consumption. Ive always wondered if precisely monitoring body temperature might tell you something about consumption, since there is this 'thermic effect of food'. Would be hard to get right though ... In the lab, we can use doubly-labelled water to precisely measure calorie intake and burn, but its so damned expensive. If only it were commercially viable.

About post-consumption could a turd-shot help to compute the calories in/out ?

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#112

Post by tryitnow »

HamSession wrote: post #108
nathan_f77 wrote: post #86

I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal. I won't trust an AI until it has a massive database and a million users. Until then, it's just not going to work well enough. You also need to convince users why they should use your app, instead of MyFitnessPal (which already has a massive database, including…

I agree with your suggestions for human assessment because of problem posed by food calories varying significantly due to different preparations. Take for example soda, if I gave you a picture of soda in a glass could you tell it was diet or regular? You might scoff at such an edge case but it quickly becomes more common when looking into food perpetration techniques. This is why caloric estimation is a really diffic…

How is that " the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts"?

That seems to violate the laws of thermodynamics.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#113

Post by dimino »

jcoffland wrote: post #66
AJRF wrote: post #10

Something like this would be a fantastic addition to MyFitnessPal. I find myself sometimes not logging food on that app because I couldn't be bothered to search for it. On the other hand if the product has a barcode I always scan it in because that is convenient.

If you're eatting a lot of food with barcodes on it then your doing it wrong.

All food has bar codes.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#114

Post by zopf »

subcosmos wrote: post #2

Built using those newfangled convolutional neural network things. Trained caffe on a set of about a million food related images. Can't believe how accurate the classifier is... UI needs work. Would love feedback on how to make food logging more intuitive.

Where'd you get your images? Food-101 plus something else?

We're working on a similar component for our commercial behavioral-economics-driven app suite, targeted toward patients with chronic diseases.

Do you use location as a way to filter the set of possible foods, as in Google's im2calories project/paper last year?

They do some pretty awesome depth calculation stuff too: https://www.google.com/?ion=1&espv=2#q=im2calories+type:pdf

Edit: oops, should have read further. I see that you pulled appropriate terms from WordNet and used ImageNet to gather training images from Flickr. Cool!

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#115

Post by logn »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #86

I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal. I won't trust an AI until it has a massive database and a million users. Until then, it's just not going to work well enough. You also need to convince users why they should use your app, instead of MyFitnessPal (which already has a massive database, including…

It would be difficult to account properly for ingredients such as butter and oil which are hard to see in a finished dish and drastically affect the calories.

But people would probably still pay as long as it's a good faith attempt, since they can't necessarily do better themselves, so it would be just as accurate and save time.

And with geolocation, you could start to figure out where people are and then you'd know exactly the calories if they're at a chain restaurant.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#116

Post by internaut »

koolba wrote: post #75

Someone should combine this AI with something like Google glass (so you don't have to pull out your phone), a basic calorie/nutrition filter, and a shock bracelet[1]. That way when I look at a Krispy Kreme donut I get immediate feedback! [1]: http://pavlok.com/hello.php

I'm dying here. Sign me up for your startup.

Let's call it: "American Dystopia"

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#117

Post by subcosmos »

logn wrote: post #115
nathan_f77 wrote: post #86

I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal. I won't trust an AI until it has a massive database and a million users. Until then, it's just not going to work well enough. You also need to convince users why they should use your app, instead of MyFitnessPal (which already has a massive database, including…

It would be difficult to account properly for ingredients such as butter and oil which are hard to see in a finished dish and drastically affect the calories. But people would probably still pay as long as it's a good faith attempt, since they can't necessarily do better themselves, so it would be just as accurate and save time. And with geolocation, you could start to figure out where people are and then you'd know…

Yup! The app as it stands does geolocation and factors this into account for nutrition lookups, but I could certainly do this automatically without requiring a check in.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#118

Post by hammock »

dimino wrote: post #113
jcoffland wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're eatting a lot of food with barcodes on it then your doing it wrong.

All food has bar codes.

Produce is probably the most common type of food that does not typically have a barcode. It has a product code on it that is entered in manually while the weight measurement is taken.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#119

Post by [deleted] »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #86

I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal. I won't trust an AI until it has a massive database and a million users. Until then, it's just not going to work well enough. You also need to convince users why they should use your app, instead of MyFitnessPal (which already has a massive database, including…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

#120

Post by [deleted] »

logn wrote: post #115
nathan_f77 wrote: post #86

I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal. I won't trust an AI until it has a massive database and a million users. Until then, it's just not going to work well enough. You also need to convince users why they should use your app, instead of MyFitnessPal (which already has a massive database, including…

It would be difficult to account properly for ingredients such as butter and oil which are hard to see in a finished dish and drastically affect the calories. But people would probably still pay as long as it's a good faith attempt, since they can't necessarily do better themselves, so it would be just as accurate and save time. And with geolocation, you could start to figure out where people are and then you'd know…

[deleted]
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