When Multimedia Meets Food: Multimedia Computing for Food Data Analysis and Applications

Petia Radeva

Abstract: Food is central in our life for its fundamental role in our survival, health, mood and culture. The deployment of various networks (e.g., IoT and mobile networks), devices (e.g., hyperspectral imaging devices, electronic nose/tongue), databases (e.g., nutrition tables and food compositional databases), recipe-sharing websites (e.g., Yummly and Meishijie) and social media (e.g., Twitter and Weibo) has generated unprecedented volumes of multi-modal food data. Such multi-source multi-modal food data provides new perspectives to analyze and understand food consumption via multimedia computing. Riding on the wave of AI, food-oriented multimedia computing integrates AI, multimedia technology and food science to enable a wide spectrum of food computing tasks like food-oriented recognition, retrieval, recommendation, generation and knowledge graph construction, driving food intelligence. For its broad potential applications in dietary experience, food safety, nutrition and health, this field has gained increasing attention in the multimedia community in recent years.