Tracking Food Materials with Changing Their Appearance in Food Preparing

This paper describes our work in computer vision to track food materials in the food preparation process. Tracking such food materials is difficult, because they are often hidden when moved by hand. Furthermore, their appearance may change in hand when they are cut or peeled. For tracking these objects in such situations, we propose a novel method that matches an object on a cooking table to one grasped in the past. We use the following three criteria to match the objects even when they are cut or peeled: the similarity in their appearance, the validity of their change in appearance, and the grasped order. We experimentally evaluated our method by applying it to the scenes of cutting and peeling food materials. As a result, we achieved an accuracy of 83.6% in matching the objects.