Washington: How nice it would be if your app could count the calories in your Instagram food photos.
Google is aiming to develop a new app that will estimate the calories of the food from the photos on people’s Instagram feed.
Im2Calories will make rough guesses about the food’s calorie count and will get better over time as it processes more images. The idea came from DeepMind, a company Google bought in 2014 for $400 million.
“If it only works 30 percent of the time, it’s enough that people will start using it, we’ll collect data, and it’ll get better over time,†Kevin Murphy, a Google research scientist, told a leading daily.
According to Google, the app doesn’t need high-resolution images to work.
The system is semi-autonomous. For instance, if it’s unable to accurately determine the exact type of food from the image, it will provide a drop down menu with a list of its best guesses.
While the kinks of the app are still being worked out, Google has already filed its patent application for the app.