Abstract: Saffron is a well-known product in the food industry. It is one of the spices that are sometimes adulterated with the sole motive of gaining more economic profit. Today, machine vision systems are widely used in controlling the quality of food and agricultural products as a new, non-destructive, and inexpensive approach. In this study, a machine vision system based on deep learning was used to detect fraud and saffron quality. A dataset of 1869 images was created and categorized in 6 classes including: dried saffron stigma using a dryer; dried saffron stigma using pressing method; pure stem of saffron; sunflower; saffron stem mixed with food coloring; and corn silk mixed with food coloring. A Learning-to-Augment incorporated Inception-v4 Convolutional Neural Network (LAII-v4 CNN) was developed for grading and fraud detection of saffron in images captured by smartphones. The best policies of data augmentation were selected with the proposed LAII-v4 CNN using images corrupted by Gaussian, speckle, and impulse noise to address overfitting the model. The proposed LAII-v4 CNN compared with regular CNN-based methods and traditional classifiers. Ensemble of Bagged Decision Trees, Ensemble of Boosted Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbor, Random Under-sampling Boosted Trees, and Support Vector Machine were used for classification of the features extracted by Histograms of Oriented Gradients and Local Binary Patterns, and selected by the Principal Component Analysis. The results showed that the proposed LAII-v4 CNN with an accuracy of 99.5% has achieved the best performance by employing batch normalization, Dropout, and leaky ReLU.

Abstract: Wearable sensors (e.g., lifelogging cameras) represent very useful tools to monitor people's daily habits and lifestyle. Wearable cameras are able to continuously capture different moments of the day of their wearers, their environment, and interactions with objects, people, and places reflecting their personal lifestyle. The food places where people eat, drink, and buy food, such as restaurants, bars, and supermarkets, can directly affect their daily dietary intake and behavior. Consequently, developing an automated monitoring system based on analyzing a person's food habits from daily recorded egocentric photo-streams of the food places can provide valuable means for people to improve their eating habits. This can be done by generating a detailed report of the time spent in specific food places by classifying the captured food place images to different groups. In this paper, we propose a self-attention mechanism with multi-scale atrous convolutional networks to generate discriminative features from image streams to recognize a predetermined set of food place categories. We apply our model on an egocentric food place dataset called “EgoFoodPlaces” that comprises of 43 392 images captured by 16 individuals using a lifelogging camera. The proposed model achieved an overall classification accuracy of 80% on the “EgoFoodPlaces” dataset, respectively, outperforming the baseline methods, such as VGG16, ResNet50, and InceptionV3.

Abstract: Eating habits are learned throughout the early stages of our lives. However, it is not easy to be aware of how our food-related routine affects our healthy living. In this work, we address the unsupervised discovery of nutritional habits from egocentric photo-streams. We build a food-related behavioral pattern discovery model, which discloses nutritional routines from the activities performed throughout the days. To do so, we rely on Dynamic-Time-Warping for the evaluation of similarity among the collected days. Within this framework, we present a simple, but robust and fast novel classification pipeline that outperforms the state-of-the-art on food-related image classification with a weighted accuracy and F-score of 70% and 63%, respectively. Later, we identify days composed of nutritional activities that do not describe the habits of the person as anomalies in the daily life of the user with the Isolation Forest method. Furthermore, we show an application for the identification of food-related scenes when the camera wearer eats in isolation. Results have shown the good performance of the proposed model and its relevance to visualize the nutritional habits of individuals.