Jiangpeng He

CV
h-index50
48papers
932citations
Novelty44%
AI Score54

48 Papers

CVApr 13Code
V-Nutri: Dish-Level Nutrition Estimation from Egocentric Cooking Videos

Chengkun Yue, Chuanzhi Xu, Jiangpeng He

Nutrition estimation of meals from visual data is an important problem for dietary monitoring and computational health, but existing approaches largely rely on single images of the finally completed dish. This setting is fundamentally limited because many nutritionally relevant ingredients and transformations, such as oils, sauces, and mixed components, become visually ambiguous after cooking, making accurate calorie and macronutrient estimation difficult. In this paper, we investigate whether the cooking process information from egocentric cooking videos can contribute to dish-level nutrition estimation. First, we further manually annotated the HD-EPIC dataset and established the first benchmark for video-based nutrition estimation. Most importantly, we propose V-Nutri, a staged framework that combines Nutrition5K-pretrained visual backbones with a lightweight fusion module that aggregates features from the final dish frame and cooking process keyframes extracted from the egocentric videos. V-Nutri also includes a cooking keyframes selection module, a VideoMamba-based event-detection model that targets ingredient-addition moments. Experiments on the HD-EPIC dataset show that process cues can provide complementary nutritional evidence, improving nutrition estimation under controlled conditions. Our results further indicate that the benefit of process keyframes depends strongly on backbone representation capacity and event detection quality. Our code and annotated dataset is available at https://github.com/K624-YCK/V-Nutri.

CVOct 26, 2022
Long-tailed Food Classification

Jiangpeng He, Luotao Lin, Heather Eicher-Miller et al.

Food classification serves as the basic step of image-based dietary assessment to predict the types of foods in each input image. However, food image predictions in a real world scenario are usually long-tail distributed among different food classes, which cause heavy class-imbalance problems and a restricted performance. In addition, none of the existing long-tailed classification methods focus on food data, which can be more challenging due to the lower inter-class and higher intra-class similarity among foods. In this work, we first introduce two new benchmark datasets for long-tailed food classification including Food101-LT and VFN-LT where the number of samples in VFN-LT exhibits the real world long-tailed food distribution. Then we propose a novel 2-Phase framework to address the problem of class-imbalance by (1) undersampling the head classes to remove redundant samples along with maintaining the learned information through knowledge distillation, and (2) oversampling the tail classes by performing visual-aware data augmentation. We show the effectiveness of our method by comparing with existing state-of-the-art long-tailed classification methods and show improved performance on both Food101-LT and VFN-LT benchmarks. The results demonstrate the potential to apply our method to related real life applications.

CVAug 3, 2023
An End-to-end Food Portion Estimation Framework Based on Shape Reconstruction from Monocular Image

Zeman Shao, Gautham Vinod, Jiangpeng He et al.

Dietary assessment is a key contributor to monitoring health status. Existing self-report methods are tedious and time-consuming with substantial biases and errors. Image-based food portion estimation aims to estimate food energy values directly from food images, showing great potential for automated dietary assessment solutions. Existing image-based methods either use a single-view image or incorporate multi-view images and depth information to estimate the food energy, which either has limited performance or creates user burdens. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for food energy estimation from a monocular image through 3D shape reconstruction. We leverage a generative model to reconstruct the voxel representation of the food object from the input image to recover the missing 3D information. Our method is evaluated on a publicly available food image dataset Nutrition5k, resulting a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 40.05 kCal and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 11.47% for food energy estimation. Our method uses RGB image as the only input at the inference stage and achieves competitive results compared to the existing method requiring both RGB and depth information.

CVJul 1, 2023
Long-Tailed Continual Learning For Visual Food Recognition

Jiangpeng He, Xiaoyan Zhang, Luotao Lin et al.

Deep learning-based food recognition has made significant progress in predicting food types from eating occasion images. However, two key challenges hinder real-world deployment: (1) continuously learning new food classes without forgetting previously learned ones, and (2) handling the long-tailed distribution of food images, where a few common classes and many more rare classes. To address these, food recognition methods should focus on long-tailed continual learning. In this work, We introduce a dataset that encompasses 186 American foods along with comprehensive annotations. We also introduce three new benchmark datasets, VFN186-LT, VFN186-INSULIN and VFN186-T2D, which reflect real-world food consumption for healthy populations, insulin takers and individuals with type 2 diabetes without taking insulin. We propose a novel end-to-end framework that improves the generalization ability for instance-rare food classes using a knowledge distillation-based predictor to avoid misalignment of representation during continual learning. Additionally, we introduce an augmentation technique by integrating class-activation-map (CAM) and CutMix to improve generalization on instance-rare food classes. Our method, evaluated on Food101-LT, VFN-LT, VFN186-LT, VFN186-INSULIN, and VFN186-T2DM, shows significant improvements over existing methods. An ablation study highlights further performance enhancements, demonstrating its potential for real-world food recognition applications.

CVJan 12, 2023
Online Class-Incremental Learning For Real-World Food Image Classification

Siddeshwar Raghavan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Food image classification is essential for monitoring health and tracking dietary in image-based dietary assessment methods. However, conventional systems often rely on static datasets with fixed classes and uniform distribution. In contrast, real-world food consumption patterns, shaped by cultural, economic, and personal influences, involve dynamic and evolving data. Thus, require the classification system to cope with continuously evolving data. Online Class Incremental Learning (OCIL) addresses the challenge of learning continuously from a single-pass data stream while adapting to the new knowledge and reducing catastrophic forgetting. Experience Replay (ER) based OCIL methods store a small portion of previous data and have shown encouraging performance. However, most existing OCIL works assume that the distribution of encountered data is perfectly balanced, which rarely happens in real-world scenarios. In this work, we explore OCIL for real-world food image classification by first introducing a probabilistic framework to simulate realistic food consumption scenarios. Subsequently, we present an attachable Dynamic Model Update (DMU) module designed for existing ER methods, which enables the selection of relevant images for model training, addressing challenges arising from data repetition and imbalanced sample occurrences inherent in realistic food consumption patterns within the OCIL framework. Our performance evaluation demonstrates significant enhancements compared to established ER methods, showing great potential for lifelong learning in real-world food image classification scenarios. The code of our method is publicly accessible at https://gitlab.com/viper-purdue/OCIL-real-world-food-image-classification

CVJul 12, 2024
MetaFood CVPR 2024 Challenge on Physically Informed 3D Food Reconstruction: Methods and Results

Jiangpeng He, Yuhao Chen, Gautham Vinod et al.

The increasing interest in computer vision applications for nutrition and dietary monitoring has led to the development of advanced 3D reconstruction techniques for food items. However, the scarcity of high-quality data and limited collaboration between industry and academia have constrained progress in this field. Building on recent advancements in 3D reconstruction, we host the MetaFood Workshop and its challenge for Physically Informed 3D Food Reconstruction. This challenge focuses on reconstructing volume-accurate 3D models of food items from 2D images, using a visible checkerboard as a size reference. Participants were tasked with reconstructing 3D models for 20 selected food items of varying difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. The easy level provides 200 images, the medium level provides 30 images, and the hard level provides only 1 image for reconstruction. In total, 16 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The solutions developed in this challenge achieved promising results in 3D food reconstruction, with significant potential for improving portion estimation for dietary assessment and nutritional monitoring. More details about this workshop challenge and access to the dataset can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/cvpr-metafood-2024.

CVApr 12, 2022
Out-Of-Distribution Detection In Unsupervised Continual Learning

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Unsupervised continual learning aims to learn new tasks incrementally without requiring human annotations. However, most existing methods, especially those targeted on image classification, only work in a simplified scenario by assuming all new data belong to new tasks, which is not realistic if the class labels are not provided. Therefore, to perform unsupervised continual learning in real life applications, an out-of-distribution detector is required at beginning to identify whether each new data corresponds to a new task or already learned tasks, which still remains under-explored yet. In this work, we formulate the problem for Out-of-distribution Detection in Unsupervised Continual Learning (OOD-UCL) with the corresponding evaluation protocol. In addition, we propose a novel OOD detection method by correcting the output bias at first and then enhancing the output confidence for in-distribution data based on task discriminativeness, which can be applied directly without modifying the learning procedures and objectives of continual learning. Our method is evaluated on CIFAR-100 dataset by following the proposed evaluation protocol and we show improved performance compared with existing OOD detection methods under the unsupervised continual learning scenario.

CVJul 1, 2023
Single-Stage Heavy-Tailed Food Classification

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Deep learning based food image classification has enabled more accurate nutrition content analysis for image-based dietary assessment by predicting the types of food in eating occasion images. However, there are two major obstacles to apply food classification in real life applications. First, real life food images are usually heavy-tailed distributed, resulting in severe class-imbalance issue. Second, it is challenging to train a single-stage (i.e. end-to-end) framework under heavy-tailed data distribution, which cause the over-predictions towards head classes with rich instances and under-predictions towards tail classes with rare instance. In this work, we address both issues by introducing a novel single-stage heavy-tailed food classification framework. Our method is evaluated on two heavy-tailed food benchmark datasets, Food101-LT and VFN-LT, and achieves the best performance compared to existing work with over 5% improvements for top-1 accuracy.

CVAug 13, 2022
Simulating Personal Food Consumption Patterns using a Modified Markov Chain

Xinyue Pan, Jiangpeng He, Andrew Peng et al.

Food image classification serves as the foundation of image-based dietary assessment to predict food categories. Since there are many different food classes in real life, conventional models cannot achieve sufficiently high accuracy. Personalized classifiers aim to largely improve the accuracy of food image classification for each individual. However, a lack of public personal food consumption data proves to be a challenge for training such models. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework to simulate personal food consumption data patterns, leveraging the use of a modified Markov chain model and self-supervised learning. Our method is capable of creating an accurate future data pattern from a limited amount of initial data, and our simulated data patterns can be closely correlated with the initial data pattern. Furthermore, we use Dynamic Time Warping distance and Kullback-Leibler divergence as metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the public Food-101 dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate promising performance compared with random simulation and the original Markov chain method.

CVJun 5, 2022
Towards the Creation of a Nutrition and Food Group Based Image Database

Zeman Shao, Jiangpeng He, Ya-Yuan Yu et al.

Food classification is critical to the analysis of nutrients comprising foods reported in dietary assessment. Advances in mobile and wearable sensors, combined with new image based methods, particularly deep learning based approaches, have shown great promise to improve the accuracy of food classification to assess dietary intake. However, these approaches are data-hungry and their performances are heavily reliant on the quantity and quality of the available datasets for training the food classification model. Existing food image datasets are not suitable for fine-grained food classification and the following nutrition analysis as they lack fine-grained and transparently derived food group based identification which are often provided by trained dietitians with expert domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a framework to create a nutrition and food group based image database that contains both visual and hierarchical food categorization information to enhance links to the nutrient profile of each food. We design a protocol for linking food group based food codes in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) to a food image dataset, and implement a web-based annotation tool for efficient deployment of this protocol.Our proposed method is used to build a nutrition and food group based image database including 16,114 food images representing the 74 most frequently consumed What We Eat in America (WWEIA) food sub-categories in the United States with 1,865 USDA food code matched to a nutrient database, the USDA FNDDS nutrient database.

CVMar 16, 2023
Conditional Synthetic Food Image Generation

Wenjin Fu, Yue Han, Jiangpeng He et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been widely investigated for image synthesis based on their powerful representation learning ability. In this work, we explore the StyleGAN and its application of synthetic food image generation. Despite the impressive performance of GAN for natural image generation, food images suffer from high intra-class diversity and inter-class similarity, resulting in overfitting and visual artifacts for synthetic images. Therefore, we aim to explore the capability and improve the performance of GAN methods for food image generation. Specifically, we first choose StyleGAN3 as the baseline method to generate synthetic food images and analyze the performance. Then, we identify two issues that can cause performance degradation on food images during the training phase: (1) inter-class feature entanglement during multi-food classes training and (2) loss of high-resolution detail during image downsampling. To address both issues, we propose to train one food category at a time to avoid feature entanglement and leverage image patches cropped from high-resolution datasets to retain fine details. We evaluate our method on the Food-101 dataset and show improved quality of generated synthetic food images compared with the baseline. Finally, we demonstrate the great potential of improving the performance of downstream tasks, such as food image classification by including high-quality synthetic training samples in the data augmentation.

CVMar 16, 2023
Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning on Food Images

Andrew Peng, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Food image analysis is the groundwork for image-based dietary assessment, which is the process of monitoring what kinds of food and how much energy is consumed using captured food or eating scene images. Existing deep learning-based methods learn the visual representation for downstream tasks based on human annotation of each food image. However, most food images in real life are obtained without labels, and data annotation requires plenty of time and human effort, which is not feasible for real-world applications. To make use of the vast amount of unlabeled images, many existing works focus on unsupervised or self-supervised learning of visual representations directly from unlabeled data. However, none of these existing works focus on food images, which is more challenging than general objects due to its high inter-class similarity and intra-class variance. In this paper, we focus on the implementation and analysis of existing representative self-supervised learning methods on food images. Specifically, we first compare the performance of six selected self-supervised learning models on the Food-101 dataset. Then we analyze the pros and cons of each selected model when training on food data to identify the key factors that can help improve the performance. Finally, we propose several ideas for future work on self-supervised visual representation learning for food images.

CVSep 15, 2023
Personalized Food Image Classification: Benchmark Datasets and New Baseline

Xinyue Pan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Food image classification is a fundamental step of image-based dietary assessment, enabling automated nutrient analysis from food images. Many current methods employ deep neural networks to train on generic food image datasets that do not reflect the dynamism of real-life food consumption patterns, in which food images appear sequentially over time, reflecting the progression of what an individual consumes. Personalized food classification aims to address this problem by training a deep neural network using food images that reflect the consumption pattern of each individual. However, this problem is under-explored and there is a lack of benchmark datasets with individualized food consumption patterns due to the difficulty in data collection. In this work, we first introduce two benchmark personalized datasets including the Food101-Personal, which is created based on surveys of daily dietary patterns from participants in the real world, and the VFNPersonal, which is developed based on a dietary study. In addition, we propose a new framework for personalized food image classification by leveraging self-supervised learning and temporal image feature information. Our method is evaluated on both benchmark datasets and shows improved performance compared to existing works. The dataset has been made available at: https://skynet.ecn.purdue.edu/~pan161/dataset_personal.html

CVAug 7, 2024
FMiFood: Multi-modal Contrastive Learning for Food Image Classification

Xinyue Pan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Food image classification is the fundamental step in image-based dietary assessment, which aims to estimate participants' nutrient intake from eating occasion images. A common challenge of food images is the intra-class diversity and inter-class similarity, which can significantly hinder classification performance. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-modal contrastive learning framework called FMiFood, which learns more discriminative features by integrating additional contextual information, such as food category text descriptions, to enhance classification accuracy. Specifically, we propose a flexible matching technique that improves the similarity matching between text and image embeddings to focus on multiple key information. Furthermore, we incorporate the classification objectives into the framework and explore the use of GPT-4 to enrich the text descriptions and provide more detailed context. Our method demonstrates improved performance on both the UPMC-101 and VFN datasets compared to existing methods.

LGApr 10Code
Continual Distillation of Teachers from Different Domains

Nicolas Michel, Maorong Wang, Jiangpeng He et al.

Deep learning models continue to scale, with some requiring more storage than many large-scale datasets. Thus, we introduce a new paradigm: Continual Distillation (CD), where a student learns sequentially from a stream of teacher models without retaining access to earlier teachers. CD faces two challenges: teacher training data is unavailable, and teachers have varying expertise. We show that external unlabeled data enables Unseen Knowledge Transfer (UKT), allowing the student to acquire information from domains not present in the training data, while known to the teacher. We also show that sequential distillation causes Unseen Knowledge Forgetting (UKF) when transferred knowledge is lost after training on later teachers. To better trade off between UKT and UKF, we propose Self External Data Distillation (SE2D), a method that preserves logits on external data to stabilize learning across heterogeneous teachers. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that SE2D reduces UKF and improves cross-domain generalization. The code and implementation for this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/Nicolas1203/continual_distillation.

CVSep 3, 2024
MetaFood3D: 3D Food Dataset with Nutrition Values

Yuhao Chen, Jiangpeng He, Gautham Vinod et al.

Food computing is both important and challenging in computer vision (CV). It significantly contributes to the development of CV algorithms due to its frequent presence in datasets across various applications, ranging from classification and instance segmentation to 3D reconstruction. The polymorphic shapes and textures of food, coupled with high variation in forms and vast multimodal information, including language descriptions and nutritional data, make food computing a complex and demanding task for modern CV algorithms. 3D food modeling is a new frontier for addressing food related problems, due to its inherent capability to deal with random camera views and its straightforward representation for calculating food portion size. However, the primary hurdle in the development of algorithms for food object analysis is the lack of nutrition values in existing 3D datasets. Moreover, in the broader field of 3D research, there is a critical need for domain-specific test datasets. To bridge the gap between general 3D vision and food computing research, we introduce MetaFood3D. This dataset consists of 743 meticulously scanned and labeled 3D food objects across 131 categories, featuring detailed nutrition information, weight, and food codes linked to a comprehensive nutrition database. Our MetaFood3D dataset emphasizes intra-class diversity and includes rich modalities such as textured mesh files, RGB-D videos, and segmentation masks. Experimental results demonstrate our dataset's strong capabilities in enhancing food portion estimation algorithms, highlight the gap between video captures and 3D scanned data, and showcase the strengths of MetaFood3D in generating synthetic eating occasion data and 3D food objects.

CVMar 31Code
Dual-Imbalance Continual Learning for Real-World Food Recognition

Xiaoyan Zhang, Jiangpeng He

Visual food recognition in real-world dietary logging scenarios naturally exhibits severe data imbalance, where a small number of food categories appear frequently while many others occur rarely, resulting in long-tailed class distributions. In practice, food recognition systems often operate in a continual learning setting, where new categories are introduced sequentially over time. However, existing studies typically assume that each incremental step introduces a similar number of new food classes, which rarely happens in real world where the number of newly observed categories can vary significantly across steps, leading to highly uneven learning dynamics. As a result, continual food recognition exhibits a dual imbalance: imbalanced samples within each food class and imbalanced numbers of new food classes to learn at each incremental learning step. In this work, we introduce DIME, a Dual-Imbalance-aware Adapter Merging framework for continual food recognition. DIME learns lightweight adapters for each task using parameter-efficient fine-tuning and progressively integrates them through a class-count guided spectral merging strategy. A rank-wise threshold modulation mechanism further stabilizes the merging process by preserving dominant knowledge while allowing adaptive updates. The resulting model maintains a single merged adapter for inference, enabling efficient deployment without accumulating task-specific modules. Experiments on realistic long-tailed food benchmarks under our step-imbalanced setup show that the proposed method consistently improves by more than 3% over the strongest existing continual learning baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyanzhang1/DIME.

CVDec 9, 2025
Food Image Generation on Multi-Noun Categories

Xinyue Pan, Yuhao Chen, Jiangpeng He et al.

Generating realistic food images for categories with multiple nouns is surprisingly challenging. For instance, the prompt "egg noodle" may result in images that incorrectly contain both eggs and noodles as separate entities. Multi-noun food categories are common in real-world datasets and account for a large portion of entries in benchmarks such as UEC-256. These compound names often cause generative models to misinterpret the semantics, producing unintended ingredients or objects. This is due to insufficient multi-noun category related knowledge in the text encoder and misinterpretation of multi-noun relationships, leading to incorrect spatial layouts. To overcome these challenges, we propose FoCULR (Food Category Understanding and Layout Refinement) which incorporates food domain knowledge and introduces core concepts early in the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of these techniques improves image generation performance in the food domain.

CVFeb 13
Implicit-Scale 3D Reconstruction for Multi-Food Volume Estimation from Monocular Images

Yuhao Chen, Gautham Vinod, Siddeshwar Raghavan et al.

We present Implicit-Scale 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Multi-Food Images, a benchmark dataset designed to advance geometry-based food portion estimation in realistic dining scenarios. Existing dietary assessment methods largely rely on single-image analysis or appearance-based inference, including recent vision-language models, which lack explicit geometric reasoning and are sensitive to scale ambiguity. This benchmark reframes food portion estimation as an implicit-scale 3D reconstruction problem under monocular observations. To reflect real-world conditions, explicit physical references and metric annotations are removed; instead, contextual objects such as plates and utensils are provided, requiring algorithms to infer scale from implicit cues and prior knowledge. The dataset emphasizes multi-food scenes with diverse object geometries, frequent occlusions, and complex spatial arrangements. The benchmark was adopted as a challenge at the MetaFood 2025 Workshop, where multiple teams proposed reconstruction-based solutions. Experimental results show that while strong vision--language baselines achieve competitive performance, geometry-based reconstruction methods provide both improved accuracy and greater robustness, with the top-performing approach achieving 0.21 MAPE in volume estimation and 5.7 L1 Chamfer Distance in geometric accuracy.

CVNov 12, 2025
PANDA - Patch And Distribution-Aware Augmentation for Long-Tailed Exemplar-Free Continual Learning

Siddeshwar Raghavan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Exemplar-Free Continual Learning (EFCL) restricts the storage of previous task data and is highly susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. While pre-trained models (PTMs) are increasingly leveraged for EFCL, existing methods often overlook the inherent imbalance of real-world data distributions. We discovered that real-world data streams commonly exhibit dual-level imbalances, dataset-level distributions combined with extreme or reversed skews within individual tasks, creating both intra-task and inter-task disparities that hinder effective learning and generalization. To address these challenges, we propose PANDA, a Patch-and-Distribution-Aware Augmentation framework that integrates seamlessly with existing PTM-based EFCL methods. PANDA amplifies low-frequency classes by using a CLIP encoder to identify representative regions and transplanting those into frequent-class samples within each task. Furthermore, PANDA incorporates an adaptive balancing strategy that leverages prior task distributions to smooth inter-task imbalances, reducing the overall gap between average samples across tasks and enabling fairer learning with frozen PTMs. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate PANDA's capability to work with existing PTM-based CL methods, improving accuracy and reducing catastrophic forgetting.

CVFeb 28, 2024
Gradient Reweighting: Towards Imbalanced Class-Incremental Learning

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) trains a model to continually recognize new classes from non-stationary data while retaining learned knowledge. A major challenge of CIL arises when applying to real-world data characterized by non-uniform distribution, which introduces a dual imbalance problem involving (i) disparities between stored exemplars of old tasks and new class data (inter-phase imbalance), and (ii) severe class imbalances within each individual task (intra-phase imbalance). We show that this dual imbalance issue causes skewed gradient updates with biased weights in FC layers, thus inducing over/under-fitting and catastrophic forgetting in CIL. Our method addresses it by reweighting the gradients towards balanced optimization and unbiased classifier learning. Additionally, we observe imbalanced forgetting where paradoxically the instance-rich classes suffer higher performance degradation during CIL due to a larger amount of training data becoming unavailable in subsequent learning phases. To tackle this, we further introduce a distribution-aware knowledge distillation loss to mitigate forgetting by aligning output logits proportionally with the distribution of lost training data. We validate our method on CIFAR-100, ImageNetSubset, and Food101 across various evaluation protocols and demonstrate consistent improvements compared to existing works, showing great potential to apply CIL in real-world scenarios with enhanced robustness and effectiveness.

CVMar 10
One Adapter for All: Towards Unified Representation in Step-Imbalanced Class-Incremental Learning

Xiaoyan Zhang, Jiangpeng He

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to acquire new classes over time while retaining prior knowledge, yet most setups and methods assume balanced task streams. In practice, the number of classes per task often varies significantly. We refer to this as step imbalance, where large tasks that contain more classes dominate learning and small tasks inject unstable updates. Existing CIL methods assume balanced tasks and therefore treat all tasks uniformly, producing imbalanced updates that degrade overall learning performance. To address this challenge, we propose One-A, a unified and imbalance-aware framework that incrementally merges task updates into a single adapter, maintaining constant inference cost. One-A performs asymmetric subspace alignment to preserve dominant subspaces learned from large tasks while constraining low-information updates within them. An information-adaptive weighting balances the contribution between base and new adapters, and a directional gating mechanism selectively fuses updates along each singular direction, maintaining stability in head directions and plasticity in tail ones. Across multiple benchmarks and step-imbalanced streams, One-A achieves competitive accuracy with significantly low inference overhead, showing that a single, asymmetrically fused adapter can remain both adaptive to dynamic task sizes and efficient at deployment.

CVApr 18, 2024
Food Portion Estimation via 3D Object Scaling

Gautham Vinod, Jiangpeng He, Zeman Shao et al.

Image-based methods to analyze food images have alleviated the user burden and biases associated with traditional methods. However, accurate portion estimation remains a major challenge due to the loss of 3D information in the 2D representation of foods captured by smartphone cameras or wearable devices. In this paper, we propose a new framework to estimate both food volume and energy from 2D images by leveraging the power of 3D food models and physical reference in the eating scene. Our method estimates the pose of the camera and the food object in the input image and recreates the eating occasion by rendering an image of a 3D model of the food with the estimated poses. We also introduce a new dataset, SimpleFood45, which contains 2D images of 45 food items and associated annotations including food volume, weight, and energy. Our method achieves an average error of 31.10 kCal (17.67%) on this dataset, outperforming existing portion estimation methods. The dataset can be accessed at: https://lorenz.ecn.purdue.edu/~gvinod/simplefood45/ and the code can be accessed at: https://gitlab.com/viper-purdue/monocular-food-volume-3d

CVMay 30, 2025
CL-LoRA: Continual Low-Rank Adaptation for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning

Jiangpeng He, Zhihao Duan, Fengqing Zhu

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn new classes sequentially while retaining the knowledge of previously learned classes. Recently, pre-trained models (PTMs) combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have shown remarkable performance in rehearsal-free CIL without requiring exemplars from previous tasks. However, existing adapter-based methods, which incorporate lightweight learnable modules into PTMs for CIL, create new adapters for each new task, leading to both parameter redundancy and failure to leverage shared knowledge across tasks. In this work, we propose ContinuaL Low-Rank Adaptation (CL-LoRA), which introduces a novel dual-adapter architecture combining \textbf{task-shared adapters} to learn cross-task knowledge and \textbf{task-specific adapters} to capture unique features of each new task. Specifically, the shared adapters utilize random orthogonal matrices and leverage knowledge distillation with gradient reassignment to preserve essential shared knowledge. In addition, we introduce learnable block-wise weights for task-specific adapters, which mitigate inter-task interference while maintaining the model's plasticity. We demonstrate CL-LoRA consistently achieves promising performance under multiple benchmarks with reduced training and inference computation, establishing a more efficient and scalable paradigm for continual learning with pre-trained models.

LGApr 6, 2024
DELTA: Decoupling Long-Tailed Online Continual Learning

Siddeshwar Raghavan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

A significant challenge in achieving ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence is the limited ability of models to rapidly learn new information in real-world scenarios where data follows long-tailed distributions, all while avoiding forgetting previously acquired knowledge. In this work, we study the under-explored problem of Long-Tailed Online Continual Learning (LTOCL), which aims to learn new tasks from sequentially arriving class-imbalanced data streams. Each data is observed only once for training without knowing the task data distribution. We present DELTA, a decoupled learning approach designed to enhance learning representations and address the substantial imbalance in LTOCL. We enhance the learning process by adapting supervised contrastive learning to attract similar samples and repel dissimilar (out-of-class) samples. Further, by balancing gradients during training using an equalization loss, DELTA significantly enhances learning outcomes and successfully mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that DELTA improves the capacity for incremental learning, surpassing existing OCL methods. Our results suggest considerable promise for applying OCL in real-world applications.

CVMar 25, 2024
Strategies to Improve Real-World Applicability of Laparoscopic Anatomy Segmentation Models

Fiona R. Kolbinger, Jiangpeng He, Jinge Ma et al.

Accurate identification and localization of anatomical structures of varying size and appearance in laparoscopic imaging are necessary to leverage the potential of computer vision techniques for surgical decision support. Segmentation performance of such models is traditionally reported using metrics of overlap such as IoU. However, imbalanced and unrealistic representation of classes in the training data and suboptimal selection of reported metrics have the potential to skew nominal segmentation performance and thereby ultimately limit clinical translation. In this work, we systematically analyze the impact of class characteristics (i.e., organ size differences), training and test data composition (i.e., representation of positive and negative examples), and modeling parameters (i.e., foreground-to-background class weight) on eight segmentation metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, IoU, F1 score (Dice Similarity Coefficient), specificity, Hausdorff Distance, and Average Symmetric Surface Distance. Our findings support two adjustments to account for data biases in surgical data science: First, training on datasets that are similar to the clinical real-world scenarios in terms of class distribution, and second, class weight adjustments to optimize segmentation model performance with regard to metrics of particular relevance in the respective clinical setting.

MMMay 13, 2024
Automatic Recognition of Food Ingestion Environment from the AIM-2 Wearable Sensor

Yuning Huang, Mohamed Abul Hassan, Jiangpeng He et al.

Detecting an ingestion environment is an important aspect of monitoring dietary intake. It provides insightful information for dietary assessment. However, it is a challenging problem where human-based reviewing can be tedious, and algorithm-based review suffers from data imbalance and perceptual aliasing problems. To address these issues, we propose a neural network-based method with a two-stage training framework that tactfully combines fine-tuning and transfer learning techniques. Our method is evaluated on a newly collected dataset called ``UA Free Living Study", which uses an egocentric wearable camera, AIM-2 sensor, to simulate food consumption in free-living conditions. The proposed training framework is applied to common neural network backbones, combined with approaches in the general imbalanced classification field. Experimental results on the collected dataset show that our proposed method for automatic ingestion environment recognition successfully addresses the challenging data imbalance problem in the dataset and achieves a promising overall classification accuracy of 96.63%.

CVNov 14, 2024
MFP3D: Monocular Food Portion Estimation Leveraging 3D Point Clouds

Jinge Ma, Xiaoyan Zhang, Gautham Vinod et al.

Food portion estimation is crucial for monitoring health and tracking dietary intake. Image-based dietary assessment, which involves analyzing eating occasion images using computer vision techniques, is increasingly replacing traditional methods such as 24-hour recalls. However, accurately estimating the nutritional content from images remains challenging due to the loss of 3D information when projecting to the 2D image plane. Existing portion estimation methods are challenging to deploy in real-world scenarios due to their reliance on specific requirements, such as physical reference objects, high-quality depth information, or multi-view images and videos. In this paper, we introduce MFP3D, a new framework for accurate food portion estimation using only a single monocular image. Specifically, MFP3D consists of three key modules: (1) a 3D Reconstruction Module that generates a 3D point cloud representation of the food from the 2D image, (2) a Feature Extraction Module that extracts and concatenates features from both the 3D point cloud and the 2D RGB image, and (3) a Portion Regression Module that employs a deep regression model to estimate the food's volume and energy content based on the extracted features. Our MFP3D is evaluated on MetaFood3D dataset, demonstrating its significant improvement in accurate portion estimation over existing methods.

IVApr 11, 2024
Learning to Classify New Foods Incrementally Via Compressed Exemplars

Justin Yang, Zhihao Duan, Jiangpeng He et al.

Food image classification systems play a crucial role in health monitoring and diet tracking through image-based dietary assessment techniques. However, existing food recognition systems rely on static datasets characterized by a pre-defined fixed number of food classes. This contrasts drastically with the reality of food consumption, which features constantly changing data. Therefore, food image classification systems should adapt to and manage data that continuously evolves. This is where continual learning plays an important role. A challenge in continual learning is catastrophic forgetting, where ML models tend to discard old knowledge upon learning new information. While memory-replay algorithms have shown promise in mitigating this problem by storing old data as exemplars, they are hampered by the limited capacity of memory buffers, leading to an imbalance between new and previously learned data. To address this, our work explores the use of neural image compression to extend buffer size and enhance data diversity. We introduced the concept of continuously learning a neural compression model to adaptively improve the quality of compressed data and optimize the bitrates per pixel (bpp) to store more exemplars. Our extensive experiments, including evaluations on food-specific datasets including Food-101 and VFN-74, as well as the general dataset ImageNet-100, demonstrate improvements in classification accuracy. This progress is pivotal in advancing more realistic food recognition systems that are capable of adapting to continually evolving data. Moreover, the principles and methodologies we've developed hold promise for broader applications, extending their benefits to other domains of continual machine learning systems.

CVJul 9, 2025
Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models for Nutrition Analysis: A New Benchmark Enriched with Contextual Metadata

Bruce Coburn, Jiangpeng He, Megan E. Rollo et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly applied to meal images for nutrition analysis. However, existing work primarily evaluates proprietary models, such as GPT-4. This leaves the broad range of LLMs underexplored. Additionally, the influence of integrating contextual metadata and its interaction with various reasoning modifiers remains largely uncharted. This work investigates how interpreting contextual metadata derived from GPS coordinates (converted to location/venue type), timestamps (transformed into meal/day type), and the food items present can enhance LMM performance in estimating key nutritional values. These values include calories, macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, fat), and portion sizes. We also introduce \textbf{ACETADA}, a new food-image dataset slated for public release. This open dataset provides nutrition information verified by the dietitian and serves as the foundation for our analysis. Our evaluation across eight LMMs (four open-weight and four closed-weight) first establishes the benefit of contextual metadata integration over straightforward prompting with images alone. We then demonstrate how this incorporation of contextual information enhances the efficacy of reasoning modifiers, such as Chain-of-Thought, Multimodal Chain-of-Thought, Scale Hint, Few-Shot, and Expert Persona. Empirical results show that integrating metadata intelligently, when applied through straightforward prompting strategies, can significantly reduce the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) in predicted nutritional values. This work highlights the potential of context-aware LMMs for improved nutrition analysis.

CVMar 10, 2024
Probing Image Compression For Class-Incremental Learning

Justin Yang, Zhihao Duan, Andrew Peng et al.

Image compression emerges as a pivotal tool in the efficient handling and transmission of digital images. Its ability to substantially reduce file size not only facilitates enhanced data storage capacity but also potentially brings advantages to the development of continual machine learning (ML) systems, which learn new knowledge incrementally from sequential data. Continual ML systems often rely on storing representative samples, also known as exemplars, within a limited memory constraint to maintain the performance on previously learned data. These methods are known as memory replay-based algorithms and have proven effective at mitigating the detrimental effects of catastrophic forgetting. Nonetheless, the limited memory buffer size often falls short of adequately representing the entire data distribution. In this paper, we explore the use of image compression as a strategy to enhance the buffer's capacity, thereby increasing exemplar diversity. However, directly using compressed exemplars introduces domain shift during continual ML, marked by a discrepancy between compressed training data and uncompressed testing data. Additionally, it is essential to determine the appropriate compression algorithm and select the most effective rate for continual ML systems to balance the trade-off between exemplar quality and quantity. To this end, we introduce a new framework to incorporate image compression for continual ML including a pre-processing data compression step and an efficient compression rate/algorithm selection method. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets and show that our method significantly improves image classification accuracy in continual ML settings.

CVJan 27
Size Matters: Reconstructing Real-Scale 3D Models from Monocular Images for Food Portion Estimation

Gautham Vinod, Bruce Coburn, Siddeshwar Raghavan et al.

The rise of chronic diseases related to diet, such as obesity and diabetes, emphasizes the need for accurate monitoring of food intake. While AI-driven dietary assessment has made strides in recent years, the ill-posed nature of recovering size (portion) information from monocular images for accurate estimation of ``how much did you eat?'' is a pressing challenge. Some 3D reconstruction methods have achieved impressive geometric reconstruction but fail to recover the crucial real-world scale of the reconstructed object, limiting its usage in precision nutrition. In this paper, we bridge the gap between 3D computer vision and digital health by proposing a method that recovers a true-to-scale 3D reconstructed object from a monocular image. Our approach leverages rich visual features extracted from models trained on large-scale datasets to estimate the scale of the reconstructed object. This learned scale enables us to convert single-view 3D reconstructions into true-to-life, physically meaningful models. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on two publicly available datasets show that our method consistently outperforms existing techniques, achieving nearly a 30% reduction in mean absolute volume-estimation error, showcasing its potential to enhance the domain of precision nutrition. Code: https://gitlab.com/viper-purdue/size-matters

CVMar 18, 2025
Robust3D-CIL: Robust Class-Incremental Learning for 3D Perception

Jinge Ma, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

3D perception plays a crucial role in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and AR/VR. In practical scenarios, 3D perception models must continuously adapt to new data and emerging object categories, but retraining from scratch incurs prohibitive costs. Therefore, adopting class-incremental learning (CIL) becomes particularly essential. However, real-world 3D point cloud data often include corrupted samples, which poses significant challenges for existing CIL methods and leads to more severe forgetting on corrupted data. To address these challenges, we consider the scenario in which a CIL model can be updated using point clouds with unknown corruption to better simulate real-world conditions. Inspired by Farthest Point Sampling, we propose a novel exemplar selection strategy that effectively preserves intra-class diversity when selecting replay exemplars, mitigating forgetting induced by data corruption. Furthermore, we introduce a point cloud downsampling-based replay method to utilize the limited replay buffer memory more efficiently, thereby further enhancing the model's continual learning ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the performance of replay-based CIL baselines by 2% to 11%, proving its effectiveness and promising potential for real-world 3D applications.

LGFeb 26, 2025
From Offline to Online Memory-Free and Task-Free Continual Learning via Fine-Grained Hypergradients

Nicolas Michel, Maorong Wang, Jiangpeng He et al.

Continual Learning (CL) aims to learn from a non-stationary data stream where the underlying distribution changes over time. While recent advances have produced efficient memory-free methods in the offline CL (offCL) setting, where tasks are known in advance and data can be revisited, online CL (onCL) remains dominated by memory-based approaches. The transition from offCL to onCL is challenging, as many offline methods rely on (1) prior knowledge of task boundaries and (2) sophisticated scheduling or optimization schemes, both of which are unavailable when data arrives sequentially and can be seen only once. In this paper, we investigate the adaptation of state-of-the-art memory-free offCL methods to the online setting. We first show that augmenting these methods with lightweight prototypes significantly improves performance, albeit at the cost of increased Gradient Imbalance, resulting in a biased learning towards earlier tasks. To address this issue, we introduce Fine-Grained Hypergradients, an online mechanism for rebalancing gradient updates during training. Our experiments demonstrate that the synergy between prototype memory and hypergradient reweighting substantially enhances the performance of memory-free methods in onCL and surpasses onCL baselines. Code will be released upon acceptance.

CVSep 3, 2023
Muti-Stage Hierarchical Food Classification

Xinyue Pan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Food image classification serves as a fundamental and critical step in image-based dietary assessment, facilitating nutrient intake analysis from captured food images. However, existing works in food classification predominantly focuses on predicting 'food types', which do not contain direct nutritional composition information. This limitation arises from the inherent discrepancies in nutrition databases, which are tasked with associating each 'food item' with its respective information. Therefore, in this work we aim to classify food items to align with nutrition database. To this end, we first introduce VFN-nutrient dataset by annotating each food image in VFN with a food item that includes nutritional composition information. Such annotation of food items, being more discriminative than food types, creates a hierarchical structure within the dataset. However, since the food item annotations are solely based on nutritional composition information, they do not always show visual relations with each other, which poses significant challenges when applying deep learning-based techniques for classification. To address this issue, we then propose a multi-stage hierarchical framework for food item classification by iteratively clustering and merging food items during the training process, which allows the deep model to extract image features that are discriminative across labels. Our method is evaluated on VFN-nutrient dataset and achieve promising results compared with existing work in terms of both food type and food item classification.

CVSep 1, 2023
An Improved Encoder-Decoder Framework for Food Energy Estimation

Jack Ma, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Dietary assessment is essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Automatic image-based dietary assessment is a growing field of research due to the increasing prevalence of image capturing devices (e.g. mobile phones). In this work, we estimate food energy from a single monocular image, a difficult task due to the limited hard-to-extract amount of energy information present in an image. To do so, we employ an improved encoder-decoder framework for energy estimation; the encoder transforms the image into a representation embedded with food energy information in an easier-to-extract format, which the decoder then extracts the energy information from. To implement our method, we compile a high-quality food image dataset verified by registered dietitians containing eating scene images, food-item segmentation masks, and ground truth calorie values. Our method improves upon previous caloric estimation methods by over 10\% and 30 kCal in terms of MAPE and MAE respectively.

CVSep 1, 2023
Diffusion Model with Clustering-based Conditioning for Food Image Generation

Yue Han, Jiangpeng He, Mridul Gupta et al.

Image-based dietary assessment serves as an efficient and accurate solution for recording and analyzing nutrition intake using eating occasion images as input. Deep learning-based techniques are commonly used to perform image analysis such as food classification, segmentation, and portion size estimation, which rely on large amounts of food images with annotations for training. However, such data dependency poses significant barriers to real-world applications, because acquiring a substantial, diverse, and balanced set of food images can be challenging. One potential solution is to use synthetic food images for data augmentation. Although existing work has explored the use of generative adversarial networks (GAN) based structures for generation, the quality of synthetic food images still remains subpar. In addition, while diffusion-based generative models have shown promising results for general image generation tasks, the generation of food images can be challenging due to the substantial intra-class variance. In this paper, we investigate the generation of synthetic food images based on the conditional diffusion model and propose an effective clustering-based training framework, named ClusDiff, for generating high-quality and representative food images. The proposed method is evaluated on the Food-101 dataset and shows improved performance when compared with existing image generation works. We also demonstrate that the synthetic food images generated by ClusDiff can help address the severe class imbalance issue in long-tailed food classification using the VFN-LT dataset.

CVFeb 11, 2022
Exemplar-free Online Continual Learning

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Targeted for real world scenarios, online continual learning aims to learn new tasks from sequentially available data under the condition that each data is observed only once by the learner. Though recent works have made remarkable achievements by storing part of learned task data as exemplars for knowledge replay, the performance is greatly relied on the size of stored exemplars while the storage consumption is a significant constraint in continual learning. In addition, storing exemplars may not always be feasible for certain applications due to privacy concerns. In this work, we propose a novel exemplar-free method by leveraging nearest-class-mean (NCM) classifier where the class mean is estimated during training phase on all data seen so far through online mean update criteria. We focus on image classification task and conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets including CIFAR-100 and Food-1k. The results demonstrate that our method without using any exemplar outperforms state-of-the-art exemplar-based approaches with large margins under standard protocol (20 exemplars per class) and is able to achieve competitive performance even with larger exemplar size (100 exemplars per class).

CVOct 17, 2021
Online Continual Learning Via Candidates Voting

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Continual learning in online scenario aims to learn a sequence of new tasks from data stream using each data only once for training, which is more realistic than in offline mode assuming data from new task are all available. However, this problem is still under-explored for the challenging class-incremental setting in which the model classifies all classes seen so far during inference. Particularly, performance struggles with increased number of tasks or additional classes to learn for each task. In addition, most existing methods require storing original data as exemplars for knowledge replay, which may not be feasible for certain applications with limited memory budget or privacy concerns. In this work, we introduce an effective and memory-efficient method for online continual learning under class-incremental setting through candidates selection from each learned task together with prior incorporation using stored feature embeddings instead of original data as exemplars. Our proposed method implemented for image classification task achieves the best results under different benchmark datasets for online continual learning including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and CORE-50 while requiring much less memory resource compared with existing works.

CVOct 5, 2021
An Integrated System for Mobile Image-Based Dietary Assessment

Zeman Shao, Yue Han, Jiangpeng He et al.

Accurate assessment of dietary intake requires improved tools to overcome limitations of current methods including user burden and measurement error. Emerging technologies such as image-based approaches using advanced machine learning techniques coupled with widely available mobile devices present new opportunities to improve the accuracy of dietary assessment that is cost-effective, convenient and timely. However, the quality and quantity of datasets are essential for achieving good performance for automated image analysis. Building a large image dataset with high quality groundtruth annotation is a challenging problem, especially for food images as the associated nutrition information needs to be provided or verified by trained dietitians with domain knowledge. In this paper, we present the design and development of a mobile, image-based dietary assessment system to capture and analyze dietary intake, which has been deployed in both controlled-feeding and community-dwelling dietary studies. Our system is capable of collecting high quality food images in naturalistic settings and provides groundtruth annotations for developing new computational approaches.

CVSep 6, 2021
Improving Dietary Assessment Via Integrated Hierarchy Food Classification

Runyu Mao, Jiangpeng He, Luotao Lin et al.

Image-based dietary assessment refers to the process of determining what someone eats and how much energy and nutrients are consumed from visual data. Food classification is the first and most crucial step. Existing methods focus on improving accuracy measured by the rate of correct classification based on visual information alone, which is very challenging due to the high complexity and inter-class similarity of foods. Further, accuracy in food classification is conceptual as description of a food can always be improved. In this work, we introduce a new food classification framework to improve the quality of predictions by integrating the information from multiple domains while maintaining the classification accuracy. We apply a multi-task network based on a hierarchical structure that uses both visual and nutrition domain specific information to cluster similar foods. Our method is validated on the modified VIPER-FoodNet (VFN) food image dataset by including associated energy and nutrient information. We achieve comparable classification accuracy with existing methods that use visual information only, but with less error in terms of energy and nutrient values for the wrong predictions.

CVAug 15, 2021
Online Continual Learning For Visual Food Classification

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Food image classification is challenging for real-world applications since existing methods require static datasets for training and are not capable of learning from sequentially available new food images. Online continual learning aims to learn new classes from data stream by using each new data only once without forgetting the previously learned knowledge. However, none of the existing works target food image analysis, which is more difficult to learn incrementally due to its high intra-class variation with the unbalanced and unpredictable characteristics of future food class distribution. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing (1) a novel clustering based exemplar selection algorithm to store the most representative data belonging to each learned food for knowledge replay, and (2) an effective online learning regime using balanced training batch along with the knowledge distillation on augmented exemplars to maintain the model performance on all learned classes. Our method is evaluated on a challenging large scale food image database, Food-1K, by varying the number of newly added food classes. Our results show significant improvements compared with existing state-of-the-art online continual learning methods, showing great potential to achieve lifelong learning for food image classification in real world.

CVApr 14, 2021
Unsupervised Continual Learning Via Pseudo Labels

Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Continual learning aims to learn new tasks incrementally using less computation and memory resources instead of retraining the model from scratch whenever new task arrives. However, existing approaches are designed in supervised fashion assuming all data from new tasks have been manually annotated, which are not practical for many real-life applications. In this work, we propose to use pseudo label instead of the ground truth to make continual learning feasible in unsupervised mode. The pseudo labels of new data are obtained by applying global clustering algorithm and we propose to use the model updated from last incremental step as the feature extractor. Due to the scarcity of existing work, we introduce a new benchmark experimental protocol for unsupervised continual learning of image classification task under class-incremental setting where no class label is provided for each incremental learning step. Our method is evaluated on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet (ILSVRC) datasets by incorporating the pseudo label with various existing supervised approaches and show promising results in unsupervised scenario.

CVMar 12, 2021
Towards Learning Food Portion From Monocular Images With Cross-Domain Feature Adaptation

Zeman Shao, Shaobo Fang, Runyu Mao et al.

We aim to estimate food portion size, a property that is strongly related to the presence of food object in 3D space, from single monocular images under real life setting. Specifically, we are interested in end-to-end estimation of food portion size, which has great potential in the field of personal health management. Unlike image segmentation or object recognition where annotation can be obtained through large scale crowd sourcing, it is much more challenging to collect datasets for portion size estimation since human cannot accurately estimate the size of an object in an arbitrary 2D image without expert knowledge. To address such challenge, we introduce a real life food image dataset collected from a nutrition study where the groundtruth food energy (calorie) is provided by registered dietitians, and will be made available to the research community. We propose a deep regression process for portion size estimation by combining features estimated from both RGB and learned energy distribution domains. Our estimates of food energy achieved state-of-the-art with a MAPE of 11.47%, significantly outperforms non-expert human estimates by 27.56%.

CVFeb 1, 2021
An End-to-End Food Image Analysis System

Jiangpeng He, Runyu Mao, Zeman Shao et al.

Modern deep learning techniques have enabled advances in image-based dietary assessment such as food recognition and food portion size estimation. Valuable information on the types of foods and the amount consumed are crucial for prevention of many chronic diseases. However, existing methods for automated image-based food analysis are neither end-to-end nor are capable of processing multiple tasks (e.g., recognition and portion estimation) together, making it difficult to apply to real life applications. In this paper, we propose an image-based food analysis framework that integrates food localization, classification and portion size estimation. Our proposed framework is end-to-end, i.e., the input can be an arbitrary food image containing multiple food items and our system can localize each single food item with its corresponding predicted food type and portion size. We also improve the single food portion estimation by consolidating localization results with a food energy distribution map obtained by conditional GAN to generate a four-channel RGB-Distribution image. Our end-to-end framework is evaluated on a real life food image dataset collected from a nutrition feeding study.

CVDec 6, 2020
Visual Aware Hierarchy Based Food Recognition

Runyu Mao, Jiangpeng He, Zeman Shao et al.

Food recognition is one of the most important components in image-based dietary assessment. However, due to the different complexity level of food images and inter-class similarity of food categories, it is challenging for an image-based food recognition system to achieve high accuracy for a variety of publicly available datasets. In this work, we propose a new two-step food recognition system that includes food localization and hierarchical food classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as the backbone architecture. The food localization step is based on an implementation of the Faster R-CNN method to identify food regions. In the food classification step, visually similar food categories can be clustered together automatically to generate a hierarchical structure that represents the semantic visual relations among food categories, then a multi-task CNN model is proposed to perform the classification task based on the visual aware hierarchical structure. Since the size and quality of dataset is a key component of data driven methods, we introduce a new food image dataset, VIPER-FoodNet (VFN) dataset, consists of 82 food categories with 15k images based on the most commonly consumed foods in the United States. A semi-automatic crowdsourcing tool is used to provide the ground-truth information for this dataset including food object bounding boxes and food object labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can significantly improve both classification and recognition performance on 4 publicly available datasets and the new VFN dataset.

CVApr 27, 2020
Multi-Task Image-Based Dietary Assessment for Food Recognition and Portion Size Estimation

Jiangpeng He, Zeman Shao, Janine Wright et al.

Deep learning based methods have achieved impressive results in many applications for image-based diet assessment such as food classification and food portion size estimation. However, existing methods only focus on one task at a time, making it difficult to apply in real life when multiple tasks need to be processed together. In this work, we propose an end-to-end multi-task framework that can achieve both food classification and food portion size estimation. We introduce a food image dataset collected from a nutrition study where the groundtruth food portion is provided by registered dietitians. The multi-task learning uses L2-norm based soft parameter sharing to train the classification and regression tasks simultaneously. We also propose the use of cross-domain feature adaptation together with normalization to further improve the performance of food portion size estimation. Our results outperforms the baseline methods for both classification accuracy and mean absolute error for portion estimation, which shows great potential for advancing the field of image-based dietary assessment.

CVMar 30, 2020
Incremental Learning In Online Scenario

Jiangpeng He, Runyu Mao, Zeman Shao et al.

Modern deep learning approaches have achieved great success in many vision applications by training a model using all available task-specific data. However, there are two major obstacles making it challenging to implement for real life applications: (1) Learning new classes makes the trained model quickly forget old classes knowledge, which is referred to as catastrophic forgetting. (2) As new observations of old classes come sequentially over time, the distribution may change in unforeseen way, making the performance degrade dramatically on future data, which is referred to as concept drift. Current state-of-the-art incremental learning methods require a long time to train the model whenever new classes are added and none of them takes into consideration the new observations of old classes. In this paper, we propose an incremental learning framework that can work in the challenging online learning scenario and handle both new classes data and new observations of old classes. We address problem (1) in online mode by introducing a modified cross-distillation loss together with a two-step learning technique. Our method outperforms the results obtained from current state-of-the-art offline incremental learning methods on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1000 (ILSVRC 2012) datasets under the same experiment protocol but in online scenario. We also provide a simple yet effective method to mitigate problem (2) by updating exemplar set using the feature of each new observation of old classes and demonstrate a real life application of online food image classification based on our complete framework using the Food-101 dataset.