FoodAI: Food Image Recognition via Deep Learning for Smart Food Logging

TL;DR

FoodAI leverages deep learning for accurate food image recognition to facilitate convenient and effective food logging, aiding health management and lifestyle improvements, especially tailored for Singaporean cuisine.

Contribution

The paper introduces FoodAI, a deep learning-based food recognition system trained on 400,000 images across 756 classes, integrated into a practical health app ecosystem.

Findings

High accuracy in recognizing diverse Singaporean foods

Over 100 organizations actively use the FoodAI API

Contributed to improved food logging and health monitoring

Abstract

An important aspect of health monitoring is effective logging of food consumption. This can help management of diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes, and even cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, food logging can help fitness enthusiasts, and people who wanting to achieve a target weight. However, food-logging is cumbersome, and requires not only taking additional effort to note down the food item consumed regularly, but also sufficient knowledge of the food item consumed (which is difficult due to the availability of a wide variety of cuisines). With increasing reliance on smart devices, we exploit the convenience offered through the use of smart phones and propose a smart-food logging system: FoodAI, which offers state-of-the-art deep-learning based image recognition capabilities. FoodAI has been developed in Singapore and is particularly focused on food items commonly consumed in Singapore. FoodAI models were trained on a corpus of 400,000 food images from 756 different classes. In this paper we present extensive analysis and insights into the development of this system. FoodAI has been deployed as an API service and is one of the components powering Healthy 365, a mobile app developed by Singapore's Heath Promotion Board. We have over 100 registered organizations (universities, companies, start-ups) subscribing to this service and actively receive several API requests a day. FoodAI has made food logging convenient, aiding smart consumption and a healthy lifestyle.