Automated Design of a Computer Vision System for Visual Food Quality Evaluation

Considerable research efforts in computer vision applied to food quality evaluation have been developed in the last years; however, they have been concentrated on using or developing tailored methods based on visual features that are able to solve a specific task. Nevertheless, today’s computer capabilities are giving us new ways to solve complex computer vision problems. In particular, a new paradigm on machine learning techniques has emerged posing the task of recognizing visual patterns as a search problem based on training data and a hypothesis space composed by visual features and suitable classifiers. Furthermore, now we are able to extract, process, and test in the same time more image features and classifiers than before. Thus, we propose a general framework that designs a computer vision system automatically, i.e., it finds—without human interaction—the features and the classifiers for a given application avoiding the classical trial and error framework commonly used by human designers. The key idea of the proposed framework is to select—automatically—from a large set of features and a bank of classifiers those features and classifiers that achieve the highest performance. We tested our framework on eight different food quality evaluation problems yielding a classification performance of 95 % or more in every case. The proposed framework was implemented as a Matlab Toolbox available for noncommercial purposes.