Google continues to push hard into the realm of artificial intelligence, with its Google Now service increasingly offering predictive alerts based where you are and what you’re doing.
Its latest project, yet to be released, looks to calculate the calories on your Instagram posts, which it announced at the Rework Deep Learning Summit.
The tool, called Im2Calories, will identify food in pictures and then calculate the calorie content.
Google researcher Kevin P Murphy says the AI technology an images pixel depth and use “sophisticated deep-learning algorithms” to judge both the size and shape of the food.
According to Popular Science, the company has recently filed a patent for the technology.
“To me it’s obvious that people really want this and this is really useful. OK fine, maybe we get the calories off by 20%. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to average over a week or a month or a year.
Now we can start to potentially join information from multiple people and start to do population-level statistics. I have colleagues in epidemiology and public health, and they really want this stuff,” said Murphy.
While the research is still ongoing, such a tool could become a feature of Google’s newly launched Photos app. The goal of that app is to replace Facebook and Instagram as the go-to spot to store pictures. The service offers free, basically unlimited, storage of high resolution photos, making it a natural fit for analysis tools like Im2Calories.
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