DLMDish: Using Applied Deep Learning and Computer Vision to Automatically Classify Mauritian Dishes

Abstract

The benefits of using an automatic dietary assessment system for accompanying diabetes patients and prediabetic persons to control the risk factor also referred to as the obesity “pandemic” are now widely proven and accepted. However, there is no universal solution as eating habits of people are dependent on context and culture. This project is the cornerstone for future works of researchers and health professionals in the field of automatic dietary assessment of Mauritian dishes. We propose a process to produce a food dataset for Mauritian dishes using the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a fine Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for identifying Mauritian food dishes. The outputs and findings of this research can be used in the process of automatic calorie calculation and food recommendation, primarily using ubiquitous devices like mobile phones via mobile applications. Using the Adam optimizer with carefully fixed hyper-parameters, we achieved an Accuracy of 95.66% and Loss of 3.5% as concerns the recognition task.