A Review of Image-Based Food Recognition and Volume Estimation Artificial Intelligence Systems

The daily healthy diet and balanced intake of essential nutrients play an important role in modern lifestyle. The estimation of a meal's nutrient content is an integral component of significant diseases, such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Lately, there has been an increasing interest towards the development and utilization of smartphone applications with the aim of promoting healthy behaviours. The semi - automatic or automatic, precise and in real-time estimation of the nutrients of daily consumed meals is approached in relevant literature as a computer vision problem using food images which are taken via a user's smartphone. Herein, we present the state-of-the-art on automatic food recognition and food volume estimation methods starting from their basis, i.e., the food image databases. First, by methodically organizing the extracted information from the reviewed studies, this review study enables the comprehensive fair assessment of the methods and techniques applied for segmenting food images, classifying their food content and computing the food volume, associating their results with the characteristics of the used datasets. Second, by unbiasedly reporting the strengths and limitations of these methods and proposing pragmatic solutions to the latter, this review can inspire future directions in the field of dietary assessment systems.