Don’t Hate Google For This — It’s Going To Count Calories From Your Photos Soon

That brunch is about to get trickier.

In between uploading photos of your steaks and kababs to Instagram and waiting for the Likes to come streaming in, you could also be smacked in the face with a sobering calorie count, courtesy Google!

The company unveiled plans for a new app called Im2Calories at a tech conference in Boston last week.

Well, this could actually be more revolutionary than its autonomous car technology (Kidding! We love you, Google!).

One of the app’s goals is to make calorie tracking easier. Instead of jotting food down in a journal, or typing and using a separate app, Im2Calories piggybacks off something you might already do — snapping and sharing pics of your plate.

Im2Calories will rely on image-processing technology that can identify and recognise the food in your photos, and by analysing the pixels, the app will estimate how many calories you’re about to spear on your fork. It bases the information on publicly available nutrition labels.

The app isn’t designed to be perfect, but it will get better over time as more people start using it, said Google research scientist Kevin Murphy, according to a Popular Science report.
That’s because Im2Calories is an artificial intelligence and machine learning tool at heart. With more data, the app will learn to distinguish blueberry pancakes from chocolate chip pancakes, and if it’s wrong, Google will give you a way to change the name of what’s tagged.

This isn’t going to lead to a practical product in the short term. Google only just filed for a patent on Im2Calories’ underlying technology and has no immediate release plans, so you can post dessert photos to Instagram with relatively little guilt.

A spokesperson told CNET the technology behind Im2Calories is still in research and development. “No actual product plans at this stage”, he added.

Eventually, though, it could be a staple feature of health apps that help you balance your food habits with your activity levels. And the potential doesn’t stop there, either. While food is the “killer app”, the image recognition code could also apply to traffic prediction and anything else where a series of photos can provide a wealth of data.

“We semi-automate”, Murphy said.

Like Facebook (FB, Tech30) and other big tech companies, Google has been focused on image-processing technology lately. Its new Photos app, for example, automatically groups and strings your pictures together into albums without you having to do a thing. RealNetworks (RNWK) recently launched a comeback with a similar app called RealTimes, which automatically creates video slideshows.

Google, has already filed a patent for the capability, so expect things to starting popping up with more and more AI built in, to demystify, tag, club and process your photos with even more intuition.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.