Recognition of Multiple-Food Images by Detecting Candidate Regions

In this paper, we propose a two-step method to recognize multiple-food images by detecting candidate regions with several methods and classifying them with various kinds of features. In the first step, we detect several candidate regions by fusing outputs of several region detectors including Felzenszwalb´s deformable part model (DPM) [1], a circle detector and the JSEG region segmentation. In the second step, we apply a feature-fusion-based food recognition method for bounding boxes of the candidate regions with various kinds of visual features including bag-of-features of SIFT and CSIFT with spatial pyramid (SP-BoF), histogram of oriented gradient (HoG), and Gabor texture features. In the experiments, we estimated ten food candidates for multiple-food images in the descending order of the confidence scores. As results, we have achieved the 55.8% classification rate, which improved the baseline result in case of using only DPM by 14.3 points, for a multiple-food image data set. This demonstrates that the proposed two-step method is effective for recognition of multiple-food images.