From Canteen Food to Daily Meals: Generalizing Food Recognition to More Practical Scenarios
<|reference_start|>From Canteen Food to Daily Meals: Generalizing Food Recognition to More Practical Scenarios: The precise recognition of food categories plays a pivotal role for intelligent health management, attracting significant research attention in recent years. Prominent benchmarks, such as Food-101 and VIREO Food-172, provide abundant food image resources that catalyze the prosperity of research in this field. Nevertheless, these datasets are well-curated from canteen scenarios and thus deviate from food appearances in daily life. This discrepancy poses great challenges in effectively transferring classifiers trained on these canteen datasets to broader daily-life scenarios encountered by humans. Toward this end, we present two new benchmarks, namely DailyFood-172 and DailyFood-16, specifically designed to curate food images from everyday meals. These two datasets are used to evaluate the transferability of approaches from the well-curated food image domain to the everyday-life food image domain. In addition, we also propose a simple yet effective baseline method named Multi-Cluster Reference Learning (MCRL) to tackle the aforementioned domain gap. MCRL is motivated by the observation that food images in daily-life scenarios exhibit greater intra-class appearance variance compared with those in well-curated benchmarks. Notably, MCRL can be seamlessly coupled with existing approaches, yielding non-trivial performance enhancements. We hope our new benchmarks can inspire the community to explore the transferability of food recognition models trained on well-curated datasets toward practical real-life applications.<|reference_end|>
@article{liu2024from,
    title={From Canteen Food to Daily Meals: Generalizing Food Recognition to More
  Practical Scenarios},
    author={Guoshan Liu, Yang Jiao, Jingjing Chen, Bin Zhu, Yu-Gang Jiang},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.07403},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.07403},
    primaryClass={cs.CV cs.AI}
}