Computer vision can estimate calorie content of food at a glance

By Chris Stokel-Walker

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You can now get an estimate of the calorie content of a meal from a photo of it.

Calorie counting is one of the ways many people try to control their weight, but manually entering nutritional information about products into apps is time consuming. Cooking meals muddles things further, making it difficult to ascertain accurate calorie counts.

Robin Ruede and his colleagues at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, might be able to help. They have harnessed a commonly used neural network, DenseNet, to cross-reference …