Computer Vision in the Food Industry: Accurate, Real-time, and Automatic Food Recognition with Pretrained MobileNetV2

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using pretrained MobileNetV2 with various optimization techniques enables accurate, real-time food recognition suitable for practical applications, addressing the challenge of balancing speed, accuracy, and computational efficiency.

Contribution

The study applies MobileNetV2 with transfer learning and data augmentation to achieve efficient, accurate food recognition on a public dataset, highlighting its practical potential.

Findings

Achieved high accuracy with a lightweight model

Reduced training time compared to deeper models

Enhanced robustness through data augmentation

Abstract

In contemporary society, the application of artificial intelligence for automatic food recognition offers substantial potential for nutrition tracking, reducing food waste, and enhancing productivity in food production and consumption scenarios. Modern technologies such as Computer Vision and Deep Learning are highly beneficial, enabling machines to learn automatically, thereby facilitating automatic visual recognition. Despite some research in this field, the challenge of achieving accurate automatic food recognition quickly remains a significant research gap. Some models have been developed and implemented, but maintaining high performance swiftly, with low computational cost and low access to expensive hardware accelerators, still needs further exploration and research. This study employs the pretrained MobileNetV2 model, which is efficient and fast, for food recognition on the public Food11 dataset, comprising 16643 images. It also utilizes various techniques such as dataset understanding, transfer learning, data augmentation, regularization, dynamic learning rate, hyperparameter tuning, and consideration of images in different sizes to enhance performance and robustness. These techniques aid in choosing appropriate metrics, achieving better performance, avoiding overfitting and accuracy fluctuations, speeding up the model, and increasing the generalization of findings, making the study and its results applicable to practical applications. Despite employing a light model with a simpler structure and fewer trainable parameters compared to some deep and dense models in the deep learning area, it achieved commendable accuracy in a short time. This underscores the potential for practical implementation, which is the main intention of this study.