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Show HN: I built an AI that recognizes food

infino.me

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

#81
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.

I see you work for the folding@home guys. Excellent work!

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

#82
This should be in use at those self-registry machines at food markets. I imagine that you place the food item on the scanner and it will automatically register it or ask for human input when something unrecognized is found.

Would decrease cheating perhaps?

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

#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 literally underneath other food?

Maybe a combination of spectrometer, weight, and photos would be a future solution. I certainly don't have an idea of how it would be implemented, but I think using data from all 3 of those sources could be a good step.

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

#84

Isn't it strange that in [1] the beginning of the "Normal" BMI has more risk of death than the beginning of the "Obese"? I'd even venture to say that the "Overweight" range has, in average, lower Mortality Risk than the "Normal". PS, another plus for the Metric System. The Imperial System form includes Feet+Inches, while the metric one only needs Centimeters for the height. [1] https://www.infino.me/join/

> PS, another plus for the Metric System. The Imperial System form includes Feet+Inches, while the metric one only needs Centimeters for the height.

Don't be absurd. There's no reason one couldn't choose to input inches only, or decimal feet, or metres, decimetres and centimetres, or decimal kilometres.

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

#85
You have a business opportunity here if you train that on fresh vegetables. Many people have trouble with these issues:

1. Knowing what the hell a (example) rhubarb is or looks like.

2. Knowing if it looks fresh or about to go bad.

Being able to aim a camera slowly across an isle with it getting highlighted would solve first problem. Spinning vegetable around in front of the camera would could solve second. So, try that and make it a paid app.

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

#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 barcodes.)

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

#89
Pretty nifty, but please consider allowing creation of an account with a simple email address, or even anonymously. I really don't want to have to connect my Facebook or other social-networking information to your app in order to use it.

Thanks for allowing one to try it out without logging in via another service; it'd be great to be able to actually have an account.

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

#90

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.

How much experience with machine learning did you have before you started this project?
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