Artificial intelligence turns food images into recipes
See a picture of a delicious meal shared on your Facebook friend's "wall" and want to cook it? Facebook's new AI can do it.
Researchers at FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) have developed an AI that can “read” the food in a photo and tell you how to prepare it.
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Indeed, artificial intelligence will give you a recipe just by analyzing a photo. For example, the software can recognize that the photo is of an apple pie and will quickly identify the ingredients used and give you the recipe right away.
The system was built by scientist Adrianna Romero and a team at FAIR’s Montreal lab. The AI was trained on a large database of photos and recipes. Using machine learning, the AI learns what food the photo is about, as well as the ingredients and recipes.
“People are always taking pictures of their meals and sharing them online,” said Joelle Pineau, head of FAIR’s Montreal lab. “Sometimes, you can see a lot of the ingredients, but sometimes you don’t always see them, like salt, sugar, and things like that. So FAIR trained AI on pairs of images and recipes to come up with the best recipe for the dish in the photo.”
Earlier in 2017, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) also developed a similar AI. They created a system using a database of one million photos and one million recipes. This project ran a test and worked effectively on desserts, but there were still many problems.
Currently, Facebook has no plans to release this AI tool to its largest social networking platform.
