The search engine giant has amazed us again. Google is currently developing a new software which will be capable to analyze photographs of food and to count the calories a particular food contains.
Kevin Murphy, one of research scientists from Google, shed some light on the project. He said that the new project they are developing and referring to as the Im2Calories will use artificial intelligence to transform the fitness and health apps found on intelligent phones. He said that by utilizing the “sophisticated deep learning algorithms” and a certain depth that each of the pixels has, Im2Calories will be able to assess the portion size and the type of food involved.
Kevin Murphy also mentioned that if Im2Clories works only for about 30% of the time, that’s just about enough for people to start using the app. The company will take care of the rest, such as collect data to make it better over time.
Mountain View-based company is working on their new application that hopefully will help people to lose weight. However, it to shame it is based on a hocus-pocus science. The application was introduced this week in Boston at a tech conference. It uses algorithms so it could analyze still photographs of different food uploaded via Instagram, and to estimate how many calories it contains. Popular Science reports. The technology behind comes from a company called DeepMind, which Google acquired the year before, for the amount of approximately $400 million.
Obesity is a problem in today’s era, and as such, deserves to be looked upon as something that needs great help to be defeated. Google has the technology and knowledge to do so. With the help of their recently acquired company, DeepMind they tend to dedicate their resources to deal with this particular problem.
Due to a high number of people who post photos of their meals on a daily basis by using Instagram, this does not come as a surprise. The whole project is, of course, well-meaning, but it does not work, not really.
Jason Freidenfelds, the spokesman from Google, said for Comments to Cnet, that their new app is still in research stages and that there are no definite plans at the moment. Calorie counting, as well as food hygiene applications, are in demand and very popular for both iOS and Android users. Surprisingly, food has become a hit on social networks. Instagram is very much dedicated towards food photography and has thousands of followers, and still counting.
The food label which are the main source of information for the app, have proven to be inaccurate. That, of course, raises many questions about the accuracy of the app. Kevin Murphy stated that the app still has some identifying troubles, but he claims that it will be improved as time passes. At the end users are those who will have the last saying in the matter.
The search Giant has already filed a patent application for their new endeavor and project’s technology.
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