DietLens-Eout: Large Scale Restaurant Food Photo Recognition

Restaurant dishes represent a significant portion of food that people consume in their daily life. While people are becoming health-conscious in their food intake, convenient restaurant food tracking becomes an essential task in wellness and fitness applications. Given the huge number of dishes (food categories) involved, it becomes extremely challenging for traditional food photo classification to be feasible in both algorithm design and training data availability. In this work, we present a demo that runs on restaurant dish images in a city of millions of residents and tens of thousand restaurants. We propose a rank-loss based convolutional neural network to optimize the image features representation. Context information such as GPS location of the recognition request is also used to further improve the performance. Our experimental results are highly promising. We have shown in our demo that the proposed algorithm is near ready to be deployed in real-world applications.