Saliency-Aware Class-Agnostic Food Image Segmentation

Advances in image-based dietary assessment methods have allowed nutrition professionals and researchers to improve the accuracy of dietary assessment, where images of food consumed are captured using smartphones or wearable devices. These images are then analyzed using computer vision methods to estimate energy and nutrition content of the foods. Food image segmentation, which determines the regions in an image where foods are located, plays an important role in this process. Current methods are data dependent and thus cannot generalize well for different food types. To address this problem, we propose a class-agnostic food image segmentation method. Our method uses a pair of eating scene images, one before starting eating and one after eating is completed. Using information from both the before and after eating images, we can segment food images by finding the salient missing objects without any prior information about the food class. We model a paradigm of top-down saliency that guides the attention of the human visual system based on a task to find the salient missing objects in a pair of images. Our method is validated on food images collected from a dietary study that showed promising results.