Learning eating environments through scene clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning-based image clustering method to automatically identify and analyze different eating environments from dietary images, aiding understanding of how eating contexts relate to health.

Contribution

It presents a novel clustering approach that combines global and local features from images to classify eating environments, addressing variability among individuals.

Findings

Our method outperforms existing clustering techniques.

It effectively captures diverse eating environments.

The approach is robust to individual variability.

Abstract

It is well known that dietary habits have a significant influence on health. While many studies have been conducted to understand this relationship, little is known about the relationship between eating environments and health. Yet researchers and health agencies around the world have recognized the eating environment as a promising context for improving diet and health. In this paper, we propose an image clustering method to automatically extract the eating environments from eating occasion images captured during a community dwelling dietary study. Specifically, we are interested in learning how many different environments an individual consumes food in. Our method clusters images by extracting features at both global and local scales using a deep neural network. The variation in the number of clusters and images captured by different individual makes this a very challenging problem. Experimental results show that our method performs significantly better compared to several existing clustering approaches.