AI can count a meal’s calories based on images from a wearable camera

By Matthew Sparkes

An artificial intelligence that interprets images from wearable cameras can identify food and accurately estimate its weight to determine how many calories a person is consuming and what nutrients they are ingesting, which could be useful for automating dietary research.

Benny Lo at Imperial College London and his colleagues asked 13 subjects to wear cameras around their chests or mounted on glasses to capture images at mealtimes. The cameras took photographs every few seconds and algorithms automatically discarded more than 90 per …