Food recognition and calorie estimation using computer vision

Master Thesis
Author
Polymeropoulou, Viktoria
Πολυμεροπούλου, Βικτωρία
Date
2025-09View/ Open
Keywords
AI ; Calories ; Food ; CNN ; Mage-based calorie estimation ; 101-Food DatasetAbstract
Calorie tracking is essential for a healthy diet, but traditional tools are tedious and
prone to human error. The aim of this thesis is to develop a system capable of
automatically estimating the calorie content of food based on images. The suggested
method has two components: (1) a food classification model based on the 101-Food
Dataset and (2) an estimation model of food portion size, which can be utilized to
calculate the precise number of food calories.
Food classification is implemented by training a CNN (with transfer learning) on a
dataset containing images from 101 categories of food. Various approaches are studied
for portion size estimation, such as food detection using the YOLO model, OpenAI’s
CLIP model, and via ChatGPT’s textual reasoning abilities. While CNN-based
classification performs robustly in most cases, the portion estimation task represents
a more significant challenge. The same dish or ingredient can be arranged differently
on the plate or even partially occluded by other objects. This thesis analyzes these
limitations and proposes methods aimed at minimizing error propagation from the
segmentation stage to the portion classification stage.

