Google Developing Calorie-Counting App To Analyze Your Instagram Food Porn
MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS SF) -- When you snap an Instagram photo of your bacon and cheese-laden Saturday morning brunch, be prepared to see some numbers with it -- for better or worse.
Google is now developing an artificial intelligence app that counts the calories of food in your Instagram post.
Scientist Kevin Murphy unveiled the new project at the Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston last week. Using AI techniques known as deep and reinforcement learning to take control of a real-world environment, the app can analyze a still photo of food and estimate how many calories are on the plate, grill, ice cream cone -- whatever.
It's called Im2Calories and the goal, Murphy said, isn't to shame users with calculations of their calorie intake. Instead, it aims to make the process of keeping a food diary easier to help with nutrition and weight management.
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But it wouldn't be a Google project if those calculations didn't feed into a larger collective database.
"Now we can start to potentially join information from multiple people and start to do population level statistics," Murphy said. "I have colleagues in epidemiology and public health, and they really want this stuff."
Google just applied for a patent for Im2Calories, so you and your chili cheese dog can rest free from judgement -- for now.