Applying image analysis to assess food aesthetics and uniqueness

Abstract

This paper describes our latest work on assessing the aesthetics of food dishes by analyzing its visual appearance. Specifically, our framework builds upon work in the areas of color science, psychology and statistics to enable users to computationally assess whether the image of a dish is visually appealing. Moreover, we further assess the uniqueness of a dish by comparing its color composition against a dish image repository. The assessment engine has been recently integrated into a Google Glass Application which brings a new dimension of wearable computing to this work. Our preliminary experiments with the assessment system have shown encouraging results, and the initial deployment of the Google Glass Application has raised quite some interests.