Significant work has been conducted in the domain of food computing, yet these studies typically focus on single tasks such as t2t (instruction generation from food titles and ingredients), i2t (recipe generation from food images), or t2i (food image generation from recipes). None of these approaches integrate all modalities simultaneously. To address this gap, we introduce a novel food computing foundation model that achieves true multimodality, encompassing tasks such as t2t, t2i, i2t, it2t, and t2ti. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and pre-trained image encoder and decoder models, our model can perform a diverse array of food computing-related tasks, including food understanding, food recognition, recipe generation, and food image generation. Compared to previous models, our foundation model demonstrates a significantly broader range of capabilities and exhibits superior performance, particularly in food image generation and recipe generation tasks. We open-sourced ChefFusion at GitHub.
Food classification is the foundation for developing food vision tasks and plays a key role in the burgeoning field of computational nutrition. Due to the complexity of food requiring fine-grained classification, recent academic research mainly modifies Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and/or Vision Transformers (ViTs) to perform food category classification. However, to learn fine-grained features, the CNN backbone needs additional structural design, whereas ViT, containing the self-attention module, has increased computational complexity. In recent months, a new Sequence State Space (S4) model, through a Selection mechanism and computation with a Scan (S6), colloquially termed Mamba, has demonstrated superior performance and computation efficiency compared to the Transformer architecture. The VMamba model, which incorporates the Mamba mechanism into image tasks (such as classification), currently establishes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the ImageNet dataset. In this research, we introduce an academically underestimated food dataset CNFOOD-241, and pioneer the integration of a residual learning framework within the VMamba model to concurrently harness both global and local state features inherent in the original VMamba architectural design. The research results show that VMamba surpasses current SOTA models in fine-grained and food classification. The proposed Res-VMamba further improves the classification accuracy to 79.54\% without pretrained weight. Our findings elucidate that our proposed methodology establishes a new benchmark for SOTA performance in food recognition on the CNFOOD-241 dataset. The code can be obtained on GitHub: https://github.com/ChiShengChen/ResVMamba.
Most previous approaches for analyzing food images have relied on extensively annotated datasets, resulting in significant human labeling expenses due to the varied and intricate nature of such images. Inspired by the effectiveness of contrastive self-supervised methods in utilizing unlabelled data, we explore leveraging these techniques on unlabelled food images. In contrastive self-supervised methods, two views are randomly generated from an image by data augmentations. However, regarding food images, the two views tend to contain similar informative contents, causing large mutual information, which impedes the efficacy of contrastive self-supervised learning. To address this problem, we propose Feature Suppressed Contrast (FeaSC) to reduce mutual information between views. As the similar contents of the two views are salient or highly responsive in the feature map, the proposed FeaSC uses a response-aware scheme to localize salient features in an unsupervised manner. By suppressing some salient features in one view while leaving another contrast view unchanged, the mutual information between the two views is reduced, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of contrast learning for self-supervised food pre-training. As a plug-and-play module, the proposed method consistently improves BYOL and SimSiam by 1.70\% $\sim$ 6.69\% classification accuracy on four publicly available food recognition datasets. Superior results have also been achieved on downstream segmentation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Nowadays, it is common for people to take photographs of every beverage, snack, or meal they eat and then post these photographs on social media platforms. Leveraging these social trends, real-time food recognition and reliable classification of these captured food images can potentially help replace some of the tedious recording and coding of food diaries to enable personalized dietary interventions. Although Central Asian cuisine is culturally and historically distinct, there has been little published data on the food and dietary habits of people in this region. To fill this gap, we aim to create a reliable dataset of regional foods that is easily accessible to both public consumers and researchers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on creating a Central Asian Food Dataset (CAFD). The final dataset contains 42 food categories and over 16,000 images of national dishes unique to this region. We achieved a classification accuracy of 88.70\% (42 classes) on the CAFD using the ResNet152 neural network model. The food recognition models trained on the CAFD demonstrate computer vision's effectiveness and high accuracy for dietary assessment.
Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) and Foundation models have been the go-to recipe for achieving SoTA performance on general benchmarks. However, leveraging these powerful techniques for more complex vision-language tasks, such as cooking applications, with more structured input data, is still little investigated. In this work, we propose to leverage these techniques for structured-text based computational cuisine tasks. Our strategy, dubbed VLPCook, first transforms existing image-text pairs to image and structured-text pairs. This allows to pretrain our VLPCook model using VLP objectives adapted to the strutured data of the resulting datasets, then finetuning it on downstream computational cooking tasks. During finetuning, we also enrich the visual encoder, leveraging pretrained foundation models (e.g. CLIP) to provide local and global textual context. VLPCook outperforms current SoTA by a significant margin (+3.3 Recall@1 absolute improvement) on the task of Cross-Modal Food Retrieval on the large Recipe1M dataset. We conduct further experiments on VLP to validate their importance, especially on the Recipe1M+ dataset. Finally, we validate the generalization of the approach to other tasks (i.e, Food Recognition) and domains with structured text such as the Medical domain on the ROCO dataset. The code is available here: https://github.com/mshukor/VLPCook
Automatic food recognition is the very first step towards passive dietary monitoring. In this paper, we address the problem of food recognition by mining discriminative food regions. Taking inspiration from Adversarial Erasing, a strategy that progressively discovers discriminative object regions for weakly supervised semantic segmentation, we propose a novel network architecture in which a primary network maintains the base accuracy of classifying an input image, an auxiliary network adversarially mines discriminative food regions, and a region network classifies the resulting mined regions. The global (the original input image) and the local (the mined regions) representations are then integrated for the final prediction. The proposed architecture denoted as PAR-Net is end-to-end trainable, and highlights discriminative regions in an online fashion. In addition, we introduce a new fine-grained food dataset named as Sushi-50, which consists of 50 different sushi categories. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed approach. On three food datasets chosen (Food-101, Vireo-172, and Sushi-50), our approach performs consistently and achieves state-of-the-art results (top-1 testing accuracy of $90.4\%$, $90.2\%$, $92.0\%$, respectively) compared with other existing approaches. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Jianing-Qiu/PARNet
Automatic image-based food recognition is a particularly challenging task. Traditional image analysis approaches have achieved low classification accuracy in the past, whereas deep learning approaches enabled the identification of food types and their ingredients. The contents of food dishes are typically deformable objects, usually including complex semantics, which makes the task of defining their structure very difficult. Deep learning methods have already shown very promising results in such challenges, so this chapter focuses on the presentation of some popular approaches and techniques applied in image-based food recognition. The three main lines of solutions, namely the design from scratch, the transfer learning and the platform-based approaches, are outlined, particularly for the task at hand, and are tested and compared to reveal the inherent strengths and weaknesses. The chapter is complemented with basic background material, a section devoted to the relevant datasets that are crucial in light of the empirical approaches adopted, and some concluding remarks that underline the future directions.