[bjterry]

> or let you know how many calories you’re about to eat by looking at your lunch.

I have previously told some people that this is the holy grail of dieting apps. The difference in ease of use between entering all of the items in your meal, one by one, and just taking a photo, would be a game changer. Of course, this is just a throwaway example in the article so they probably haven't done any of the work that would be required to make this a reality (aside from the vision processing, of course). I think it could be done with thousands of human raters estimating for you instead of a machine learning system, but I was skeptical of whether it could be profitable enough to justify it as a startup on a risk/reward basis. One day, maybe we'll see it though.

[sjtrny]

The hard part about this problem is getting the scale and thus volume of the objects right. How big is that bowl holding your cereal?

[millstone]

And is that Coke or Diet Coke?

[vidarh]

And have you "hidden" a dash of syrup or 100g of nuts under the milk.

But it'd be useful for rough estimates for things like restaurant meals, with the aid of a menu.

[rtpg]

panorama-like shot + obligatory 'token' in the shot should solve that, right?

[waps]

Do the same as humans do : it's 25cl ... point. You won't be far off the mark.

[vidarh]

You probably will be far off the mark. I realized once I started tracking my food seriously that 1) those glasses I have that I though were substantially bigger than those other glasses? They held the exact same amount; 2) the amount of calories I consume could easily vary by 30% or more depending on how full I'd fill my various glasses, plates or food containers.

[waps]

I don't think getting a 30% margin of error would be all that disastrous. How big is the error margin on people measuring ?

[ehsanu1]

A 30% margin of error would seem to make calorie counting practically useless.

[waps]

I seriously doubt anyone doing calorie tracking without scales achieves less than a 30% error rate.

[MysticFear]

Meal Snap, already tries doing this:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meal-snap-calorie-counting/i...

[bjterry]

Wow, that's crazy. I actually USED DailyBurn at one point and I didn't even know this existed. Their strategy of separating everything into a bunch of superfluous apps seems to have failed pretty hard in this instance (they have a barcode reading calorie tracking app separate from their food entering calorie tracking app with neither as a superset of functionality, even though these should clearly be a single app if you want a good user experience).

Apparently the quality of the estimates is very poor for the app. The problem is that DailyBurn LITERALLY uses Mechanical Turk[1], which I don't think is what you would need to do to get accurate estimates. You would have to actually have in-house talent with training and feedback on estimating the size and calories of food. I'm pretty good at estimating the calorie content of common foods just by eyeballing because I've done it for a long time and know generally what goes into them, but this is obviously an acquired skill.

1: http://dashdingo.org/post/4391031302/how-mealsnap-works