Mobile food recognition with an extreme deep tree

Food recognition is an emerging topic in the field of computer vision. The recent interest of the research community in this area is justified by the rise in popularity of food diary applications, where the users take note of their food intake for self-monitoring or to provide useful statistics to dietitians. However, manually annotating food intake can be a tedious task, thus explaining the need of a system that automatically recognizes food, and possibly its amount, from pictures acquired by mobile devices. In this work we propose an approach to food recognition which combines the strengths of different state-of-the-art classifiers, namely Convolutional Neural Networks, Extreme Learning Machines and Neural Trees. We show that the proposed architecture can achieve good results even with low computational power, as in the case of mobile devices