Using graph cut segmentation for food calorie measurement

Calorie measurement systems that run on smart phones allow the user to take a picture of the food and measure the number of calories automatically. In order to identify the food accurately in such systems, image segmentation, which partitions an image into different regions, plays an important role. In this paper, we present the implementation of Graph cut segmentation as a means of improving the accuracy of our food classification and recognition system. Graph cut based method is well-known to be efficient, robust, and capable of finding the best contour of objects in an image, suggesting it to be a good method for separating food portions in a food image for calorie measurement. In this paper, we provide the analysis of the Graph cut algorithm as applied to food recognition. We also perform a number of experiments where we used results from the segmentation phase to the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification model. The results show an improvement in the accuracy of food recognition, especially mixed food where accuracy increases by 15% compared to our previous work [10].