A Video Processing Approach to the Study of Obesity

Currently, a significant obstacle in identifying the most important factors that contribute to obesity is the lack of appropriate tools to evaluate food consumption and physical activity on a daily basis. This paper presents a novel video-based approach to estimating the energy intake and expenditure of individuals who are over-weight or obese. We propose to utilize a miniature video camera to chronically record data surrounding an individual´s daily activity. From the recorded data, energy intake and expenditure are extracted objectively using signal processing algorithms. We discuss two algorithms which are both featured with low computational complexity, suitable for processing large sets of field-acquired video data. These algorithms estimate: (i) energy intake (caloric content) by determining the physical dimensions of the foods consumed; and (ii) energy expenditure by evaluating the extent of the subject´s physical activity. We also report initial experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach.