Gaze-Inspired Learning for Estimating the Attractiveness of a Food Photo

The number of food photos posted to the Web has been increasing. Most of the users prefer to post delicious-looking food photos. They, however, do not always look delicious. A previous work proposed a method for estimating the attractiveness of food photos, that is, the degree of how much a food photo looks delicious, as an assistive technology for taking a delicious-looking food photo. This method extracted image features from the entire food photo to evaluate the impression. In our work, we conduct a preference experiment where subjects are asked to compare a pair of food photos and measure their gaze. The proposed method extracts image features from local regions selected based on the gaze information and estimates the attractiveness of a food photo by learning regression parameters. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of extracting image features from outside the gaze regions rather than inside them.