Calcifer - Visual Calorie Estimator [17 May 2022]
Use (deep) neural networks to directly model total calories in an image.
For a given food:
- Take photos from various angles and in various conditions
- Weigh just the food---no containers, labels, or packaging
- Blend up the entire food until it is a consistent puree
- Use a bomb calorimeter or similar to find the number of calories in a gram of the puree
- Multiply by total number of grams---this becomes the target for a convnet regression problem
Repeat for a ton of foods. Also repeat for non-foods since food-ness is part of the prediction. (Not JUST calories.)
Possibly constrain the convnet into one sub-network per macro component (protein, fat, alcohol, carbohydrate)