journal article·2025-04-28Open access

Image-Based Nutritional Advisory System: Employing Multimodal Deep Learning for Food Classification and Nutritional Analysis

Sheng-Tzong Cheng, Ya-Jin Lyu, Ching Teng

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 9

Abstract

Accurate dietary assessment is essential for effective health management and disease prevention. However, conventional methods that rely on manual food logging and nutritional lookup are often time consuming and error prone. This study proposes an image-based nutritional advisory system that integrates multimodal deep learning to automate food classification, volume estimation, and dietary recommendation to address these limitations. The system employs a fine-tuned CLIP model for zero-shot food recognition, achieving high accuracy across diverse food categories, including unseen items. For volume measurement, a learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) approach eliminates the need for specialized hardware, yielding reliable estimations with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 23.5% across standard food categories. Nutritional values are then calculated by referencing verified food composition databases. Furthermore, the system leverages a large language model (Llama 3) to generate personalized dietary advice tailored to individual health goals. The experimental results show that the system attains a top 1 classification accuracy of 91% on CNFOOD-241 and 80% on Food 101 and delivers high-quality recommendation texts with a BLEU-4 score of 45.13. These findings demonstrate the system’s potential as a practical and scalable tool for automated dietary management, offering improved precision, convenience, and user experience.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Nutritional Studies and Diet

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan

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