Google Im2Calories: Measures the calories of food only from the photo – The craze with selfies is known to us all (whether we suffer from it, or we certainly see at least one person nearby suffering from it). A similar craze is the so‑called «food porn». Food porn is the selfies of the foods we eat, first we cook them, then we take a beautiful selfie and post them on social media (the phenomenon of food porn is very common and widespread, especially on Instagram).
Google is coming to tap into this madness and has created a project that, with the help of artificial intelligence, calculates the calories of the coveted food you have posted on Instagram. This new Google project, announced at the Rework Deep Learning Summit, is called Im2Calories and aims to recognize the food in the photo, analyze it and assign the calories it contains.
Google researcher Kevin P Murphy said that Im2Calories uses artificial intelligence technology that analyzes every single pixel of the photo and uses sophisticated learning algorithms to judge the size, shape and type of food. It may not have perfect predictions and fall out with exclusions around 20% sometimes, but with long-term use the difference evens out.
The success of the Food Porn craze is evident and there are already many accounts on Instagram that simply post various dishes and have thousands of followers.
Also, among other things, apps that count calories and how healthy a diet someone is eating are quite widespread among both iOS and Android users.
