An image procesing approach for calorie intake measurement

Obesity in the world has spread to epidemic proportions. In 2008 the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 1.5 billion adults were suffering from some sort of overweightness. Obesity treatment requires constant monitoring and a rigorous control and diet to measure daily calorie intake. These controls are expensive for the health care system, and the patient regularly rejects the treatment because of the excessive control over the user. Recently, studies have suggested that the usage of technology such as smartphones may enhance the treatments of obesity and overweight patients; this will generate a degree of comfort for the patient, while the dietitian can count on a better option to record the food intake for the patient. In this paper we propose a smart system that takes advantage of the technologies available for the Smartphones, to build an application to measure and monitor the daily calorie intake for obese and overweight patients. Via a special technique, the system records a photo of the food before and after eating in order to estimate the consumption calorie of the selected food and its nutrient components. Our system presents a new instrument in food intake measuring which can be more useful and effective.