Food Recognition by Integrating Local and Flat Classifiers

摘要

The recognition of food image is an interesting research topic, in which its applicability in the creation of nutritional diaries stands out with the aim of improving the quality of life of people with a chronic disease (e.g. diabetes, heart disease) or prone to acquire it (e.g. people with overweight or obese). For a food recognition system to be useful in real applications, it is necessary to recognize a huge number of different foods. We argue that for very large scale classification, a traditional flat classifier is not enough to acquire an acceptable result. To address this, we propose a method that performs prediction with local classifiers, based on a class hierarchy, or with flat classifier. We decide which approach to use, depending on the analysis of both the Epistemic Uncertainty obtained for the image in the children classifiers and the prediction of the parent classifier. When our criterion is met, the final prediction is obtained with the respective local classifier; otherwise, with the flat classifier. From the results, we can see that the proposed method improves the classification performance compared to the use of a single flat classifier.