Imagine an app that helps you cook the exact same meal you recently ate at a restaurant, or monitor your calorie intake with just a snapshot of a plate of your meal. A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed an artificial intelligence system that opens up new opportunities for the development of this direction. They named the AI system AI Pic2Recipe because it can identify the ingredients used to prepare a dish and the recipe itself with just one snapshot.
Other developers are also working on similar projects, but a common problem is the lack of samples that work accurately enough. To collect one million recipes, the team had to go through many social media and websites such as All Recipies and Food. They then supplemented the existing recipe book with additional information about their ingredients and used the collected database to train the neural network.
Result? Their system can identify ingredients such as flour, eggs, and butter, and is capable of producing the correct recipe one image at a time 65 percent of the time.
However, before the app can be used as part of their fitness program, developers will need to make it more accurate. Now everyone can test the AI on their own, if they want - simply by uploading their snapshot to the developer's demo site or by clicking on one of the available images.
Sergey Lukavsky
