Food Image Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose a food image recognition system with convolutional neural networks(CNN), which has been applied to image recognition successfully in the literature. A CNN which consists of five layers has been built and two group of controlled trials have been processed on it. Two datasets are prepared: one is UEC-FOOD100 dataset which is an open 100-class food image dataset including about 15000 images and the other is a fruit dataset that established by ourselves including over 40000 images. We have achieved the best accuracy of 80.8% on the fruit dataset and 60.9% on the multi-food dataset. In addition, we validate the method on two groups of controlled trials and discover the effect of color under various conditions that the color feature is not always helpful for improving the accuracy by comparing the results of two group of controlled trials. As future work, we will combine image segmentation with image recognition to get a better performance.