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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Why not? at least to the extent that a human can. Some AI model recognizes the type of food, estimates the amount and calculates nutrition based on that (hopefully verified with actual data, unlike in this demo).
All three of these functions already exist, all that remains is to put them together.
Ok, if you take any book, keep it closed, how many times do the letters s, q, d and r appear in the book?
There is no way to know without opening the book and counting, sure, you could make some statisticsl analysis based on the language used, but that doesn't take into account the font size and spacing, nor the number of pages.
Since the machine only has a photo to analyze, it can only give extremely generic results, making them effectively useless.
You would need to open the food up and actually analyze a part of the inside with something like a mass spectrometer to get any useful data.
I agree with you, but disagree with your reasoning.
If you take 1lb of potatoes, boil and mash them with no other add-ins, you can reasonably estimate the nutritional information through visual inspection alone, assuming you have enough reference to see there is about a pound of potatoes. There are many nutrition apps out there that utilize this, and it’s essentially just lopping off the extremes and averaging out the rest.
The problem with this is, it’s impossible to accurately guess the recipe, and therefore the ingredients. Take the aforementioned mashed potatoes. You can’t accurately tell what variety of potato was used. Was water added back during the mashing? Butter? Cream cheese? Cheddar? Sour cream? There’s no way to tell visually, assuming uniform mashing, what is in the potatoes.
Not to mention, the pin sees two pieces of bread on top of each other… what is in the bread? Who the fuck knows!
It isn't as magical (or accurate) as it looks. It's just an extension of how various health tracking apps track food intake. There's usually just one standard entry in the database for mashed potatoes based on whatever their data source thinks a reasonable default value should be. It doesn't know if what you're eating is mostly butter and cheese.
How useful a vague and not particularly accurate nutrition profile really can be is an open question, but it seems to be a popular feature for smartwatches.