Yongqing Yu¹, Yishan Zou² and Yu Sun³, ¹BASIS International School Park Lane Harbour, China, ²University of Pennsylvania, USA, ³California State Polytechnic University,USA

As obesity becomes increasingly common worldwide [9], more and more people want to lose weight – for both their health and their image. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long-term changes in daily eating habits (such as regarding food/nutrition type, calorie intake) are successful at keeping weights off [10]. Therefore, it would be helpful to have an AI mobile program that identifies the types of food the user consumes and automatically calculates the total calories. This paper examines the development and optimization of an 11-categorical food classification model based on the MobileNet neural network using Python. Specifically, it classifies any food image as one of bread, dairy, dessert, egg product, fried food, meat, noodles, rice, seafood, soup, or fruit/vegetables. Methods of optimization include data preprocessing and learning rate and batch size adjustments. Experimental results show that scaling image inputs to standard size (Python Numpy resize() function), 300 training epochs, dynamic learning rate (start with 0.001 and *0.1 for every 30 epochs), and a batch size of 16 yields our best model of 83.44% accuracy.

Food classification, Python, Data preprocessing, MobileNet, Epochs, Overfitting, Learning rate, Batch size.