Heather A. Eicher-Miller

Long Li, Yuning Huang, Heather A. Eicher-Miller et al.

Accurately assessing dietary behavior change receptivity is essential for designing effective just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) that promote healthier eating habits. However, self-report-based assessment of behavior change receptivity is sparse and delayed, limiting its practical use in continuous monitoring. To explore whether passive sensing may help address this challenge, this study conducts a pilot investigation of inferring participants' self-reported behavior change receptivity from egocentric eating images collected by a wearable camera. We use pilot data obtained from free-living eating episodes using the Automatic Ingestion Monitor v2 (AIM-2). The data included egocentric image sequences captured during eating and paired with responses to questions assessing specific dimensions of behavior change receptivity (awareness, interaction capability, and motivation). To examine whether visual information contained any relevancy to these responses, we evaluated a transfer-learning-assisted framework that combines a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) vision encoder with a lightweight transformer classifier. The model processes eating episode image sequences to extract potential semantic and temporal cues related to behavior change receptivity. Preliminary experimental results show promising improvements over simple baseline models for behavior change receptivity indicators. These early findings suggest that egocentric eating episode images may contain cues related to dietary behavior change receptivity, and warrant further investigation with larger and more comprehensive datasets.

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.

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.