Toward Dietary Assessment via Mobile Phone Video Cameras.

Reliable dietary assessment is a challenging yet essential task for determining general health. Existing efforts are manual, require considerable effort, and are prone to underestimation and misrepresentation of food intake. We propose leveraging mobile phones to make this process faster, easier and automatic. Using mobile phones with built-in video cameras, individuals capture short videos of their meals; our software then automatically analyzes the videos to recognize dishes and estimate calories. Preliminary experiments on 20 typical dishes from a local cafeteria show promising results. Our approach complements existing dietary assessment methods to help individuals better manage their diet to prevent obesity and other diet-related diseases.