Semantic food segmentation for health monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents semantic food segmentation to detect individual food items in an image. The presented approach has been developed in the context of the FoodRec project, which aims to study and develop an automatic framework to track and monitor the dietary habits of people, during their smoke quitting protocol. The goal of food segmentation is to train a model that can look at the images of food items and infer semantic information to recognize individual food items present in an image. In this contribution, we propose a novel Convolutional Deconvolutional Pyramid Network for food segmentation to understand the semantic information of an image at a pixel level. This network employs convolution and deconvolution layers to build a feature pyramid and achieves high-level semantic feature map representation. As a consequence, the novel semantic segmentation network generates a dense and precise segmentation map of the input food image. Furthermore, the proposed method demonstrated significant improvements on a well-known public benchmark dataset.