Computer vision can estimate the calorie content of food at a glance

By Chris Stokel-Walker

Computer software can estimate the calorie content of food based on a photo

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Computer software can now estimate the calorie content of food simply from a photo of a meal.

Counting calories is one of the ways many people try to manage their weight, but manually pasting nutritional information about products into apps is time consuming. Cooking meals further confuses things and makes it difficult to get accurate calorie counts.

Robin Ruede and his colleagues from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology could possibly help. They used a widely used neural network, DenseNet, to capture images of …