At Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Google research scientist Kevin Murphy unveiled a project that uses sophisticated deep learning algorithms to analyze a still photo of food, and estimate how many calories are on the plate. It's called Im2Calories.



Like many deep learning applications, it marries visual analysis in this case, determining the depth of each pixel in an image with pattern recognition. Im2Calories can draw connections between what a given piece of food looks like, and vast amounts of available caloric data.

For example if Im2Calories spots a burger, it's because the pixels in the image resemble those in existing shots of burgers, not because a researcher held the system's hand, so to speak, during various practice runs.

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