Food retrieval is an important task to perform analysis of food-related information, where we are interested in retrieving relevant information about the queried food item such as ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. In this paper, we investigate cross-modal retrieval between food images and cooking recipes. The goal is to learn an embedding of images and recipes in a common feature space, such that the corresponding image-recipe embeddings lie close to one another. Two major challenges in addressing this problem are 1) large intra-variance and small inter-variance across cross-modal food data; and 2) difficulties in obtaining discriminative recipe representations. To address these two problems, we propose Semantic-Consistent and Attention-based Networks (SCAN), which regularize the embeddings of the two modalities through aligning output semantic probabilities. Besides, we exploit a self-attention mechanism to improve the embedding of recipes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on the large-scale Recipe1M dataset, and show that we can outperform several state-of-the-art cross-modal retrieval strategies for food images and cooking recipes by a significant margin.
Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室）
The central role of food in our individual and social life, combined with recent technological advances, has motivated a growing interest in applications that help to better monitor dietary habits as well as the exploration and retrieval of food-related information. We review how visual content, context and external knowledge can be integrated effectively into food-oriented applications, with special focus on recipe analysis and retrieval, food recommendation, and the restaurant context as emerging directions.
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）
Food computing is playing an increasingly important role in human daily life, and has found tremendous applications in guiding human behavior towards smart food consumption and healthy lifestyle. An important task under the food-computing umbrella is retrieval, which is particularly helpful for health related applications, where we are interested in retrieving important information about food (e.g., ingredients, nutrition, etc.). In this paper, we investigate an open research task of cross-modal retrieval between cooking recipes and food images, and propose a novel framework Adversarial Cross-…
Food is significant to human daily life. In this paper, we are interested in learning structural representations for lengthy recipes, that can benefit the recipe generation and food cross-modal retrieval tasks. Different from the common vision-language data, here the food images contain mixed ingredients and target recipes are lengthy paragraphs, where we do not have annotations on structure information. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel method to unsupervisedly learn the sentence-level tree structures for the cooking recipes. Our approach brings together several novel ideas…
American International University-Bangladesh（孟加拉国美国国际大学）
Food is essential for human survival, and people always try to taste different types of delicious recipes. Frequently, people choose food ingredients without even knowing their names or pick up some food ingredients that are not obvious to them from a grocery store. Knowing which ingredients can be mixed to make a delicious food recipe is essential. Selecting the right recipe by choosing a list of ingredients is very difficult for a beginner cook. However, it can be a problem even for experts. One such example is recognising objects through image processing. Although this process is complex du…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
In this paper, we introduce Recipe1M+, a new large-scale, structured corpus of over one million cooking recipes and 13 million food images. As the largest publicly available collection of recipe data, Recipe1M+ affords the ability to train high-capacity modelson aligned, multimodal data. Using these data, we train a neural network to learn a joint embedding of recipes and images that yields impressive results on an image-recipe retrieval task. Moreover, we demonstrate that regularization via the addition of a high-level classification objective both improves retrieval performance to rival that…
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
People enjoy food photography because they appreciate food. Behind each meal there is a story described in a complex recipe and, unfortunately, by simply looking at a food image we do not have access to its preparation process. Therefore, in this paper we introduce an inverse cooking system that recreates cooking recipes given food images. Our system predicts ingredients as sets by means of a novel architecture, modeling their dependencies without imposing any order, and then generates cooking instructions by attending to both image and its inferred ingredients simultaneously. We extensively e…
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；DTU Compute（丹麦技术大学计算学院）；Nestle（雀巢公司）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
In this paper, we are interested in modeling a how-to instructional procedure, such as a cooking recipe, with a meaningful and rich high-level representation. Specifically, we propose to represent cooking recipes and food images as cooking programs. Programs provide a structured representation of the task, capturing cooking semantics and sequential relationships of actions in the form of a graph. This allows them to be easily manipulated by users and executed by agents. To this end, we build a model that is trained to learn a joint embedding between recipes and food images via self-supervision…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly, NTU（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学老年人积极生活联合卓越研究中心）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Sharing food has become very popular with the development of social media. For many real-world applications, people are keen to know the underlying recipes of a food item. In this paper, we are interested in automatically generating cooking instructions for food. We investigate an open research task of generating cooking instructions based on only food images and ingredients, which is similar to the image captioning task. However, compared with image captioning datasets, the target recipes are long-length paragraphs and do not have annotations on structure information. To address the above lim…
Samsung AI Center, Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Despite the abundance of multi-modal data, such as image-text pairs, there has been little effort in understanding the individual entities and their different roles in the construction of these data instances. In this work, we endeavour to discover the entities and their corresponding importance in cooking recipes automaticall} as a visual-linguistic association problem. More specifically, we introduce a novel cross-modal learning framework to jointly model the latent representations of images and text in the food image-recipe association and retrieval tasks. This model allows one to discover …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
This paper presents a three-tier modality alignment approach to learning text-image joint embedding, coined as JEMA, for cross-modal retrieval of cooking recipes and food images. The first tier improves recipe text embedding by optimizing the LSTM networks with term extraction and ranking enhanced sequence patterns, and optimizes the image embedding by combining the ResNeXt-101 image encoder with the category embedding using wideResNet-50 with word2vec. The second tier modality alignment optimizes the textual-visual joint embedding loss function using a double batch-hard triplet loss with soft…
Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）
Automatically constructing a food diary that tracks the ingredients consumed can help people follow a healthy diet. We tackle the problem of food ingredients recognition as a multi-label learning problem. We propose a method for adapting a highly performing state of the art CNN in order to act as a multi-label predictor for learning recipes in terms of their list of ingredients. We prove that our model is able to, given a picture, predict its list of ingredients, even if the recipe corresponding to the picture has never been seen by the model. We make public two new datasets suitable for this …
Cross-modal image-recipe retrieval has gained significant attention in recent years. Most work focuses on improving cross-modal embeddings using unimodal encoders, that allow for efficient retrieval in large-scale databases, leaving aside cross-attention between modalities which is more computationally expensive. We propose a new retrieval framework, T-Food (Transformer Decoders with MultiModal Regularization for Cross-Modal Food Retrieval) that exploits the interaction between modalities in a novel regularization scheme, while using only unimodal encoders at test time for efficient retrieval.…
Midea Emerging Technology Center（美的新兴技术中心）；Midea Artificial Intelligence Research Institute（美的人工智能研究院）
In this paper, we introduce a new and challenging large-scale food image dataset called "ChineseFoodNet", which aims to automatically recognizing pictured Chinese dishes. Most of the existing food image datasets collected food images either from recipe pictures or selfie. In our dataset, images of each food category of our dataset consists of not only web recipe and menu pictures but photos taken from real dishes, recipe and menu as well. ChineseFoodNet contains over 180,000 food photos of 208 categories, with each category covering a large variations in presentations of same Chinese food. We …
Cross-modal recipe retrieval has recently gained substantial attention due to the importance of food in people's lives, as well as the availability of vast amounts of digital cooking recipes and food images to train machine learning models. In this work, we revisit existing approaches for cross-modal recipe retrieval and propose a simplified end-to-end model based on well established and high performing encoders for text and images. We introduce a hierarchical recipe Transformer which attentively encodes individual recipe components (titles, ingredients and instructions). Further, we propose a…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Samsung AI Center（三星人工智能中心）
Increased awareness of the impact of food consumption on health and lifestyle today has given rise to novel data-driven food analysis systems. Although these systems may recognize the ingredients, a detailed analysis of their amounts in the meal, which is paramount for estimating the correct nutrition, is usually ignored. In this paper, we study the novel and challenging problem of predicting the relative amount of each ingredient from a food image. We propose PITA, the Picture-to-Amount deep learning architecture to solve the problem. More specifically, we predict the ingredient amounts using…
Computational food analysis (CFA) naturally requires multi-modal evidence of a particular food, e.g., images, recipe text, etc. A key to making CFA possible is multi-modal shared representation learning, which aims to create a joint representation of the multiple views (text and image) of the data. In this work we propose a method for food domain cross-modal shared representation learning that preserves the vast semantic richness present in the food data. Our proposed method employs an effective transformer-based multilingual recipe encoder coupled with a traditional image embedding architectu…
RoDE: Linear Rectified Mixture of Diverse Experts for Food Large Multi-Modal Models
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
Nowadays, driven by the increasing concern on diet and health, food computing has attracted enormous attention from both industry and research community. One of the most popular research topics in this domain is Food Retrieval, due to its profound influence on health-oriented applications. In this paper, we focus on the task of cross-modal retrieval between food images and cooking recipes. We present Modality-Consistent Embedding Network (MCEN) that learns modality-invariant representations by projecting images and texts to the same embedding space. To capture the latent alignments between mod…
Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) and Foundation models have been the go-to recipe for achieving SoTA performance on general benchmarks. However, leveraging these powerful techniques for more complex vision-language tasks, such as cooking applications, with more structured input data, is still little investigated. In this work, we propose to leverage these techniques for structured-text based computational cuisine tasks. Our strategy, dubbed VLPCook, first transforms existing image-text pairs to image and structured-text pairs. This allows to pretrain our VLPCook model using VLP objectives ada…
In this paper, we present a cross-modal recipe retrieval framework, Transformer-based Network for Large Batch Training (TNLBT), which is inspired by ACME~(Adversarial Cross-Modal Embedding) and H-T~(Hierarchical Transformer). TNLBT aims to accomplish retrieval tasks while generating images from recipe embeddings. We apply the Hierarchical Transformer-based recipe text encoder, the Vision Transformer~(ViT)-based recipe image encoder, and an adversarial network architecture to enable better cross-modal embedding learning for recipe texts and images. In addition, we use self-supervised learning t…
A rapidly growing amount of content posted online, such as food recipes, opens doors to new exciting applications at the intersection of vision and language. In this work, we aim to estimate the calorie amount of a meal directly from an image by learning from recipes people have published on the Internet, thus skipping time-consuming manual data annotation. Since there are few large-scale publicly available datasets captured in unconstrained environments, we propose the pic2kcal benchmark comprising 308,000 images from over 70,000 recipes including photographs, ingredients and instructions. To…
Creating an image reflecting the content of a long text is a complex process that requires a sense of creativity. For example, creating a book cover or a movie poster based on their summary or a food image based on its recipe. In this paper we present the new task of generating images from long text that does not describe the visual content of the image directly. For this, we build a system for generating high-resolution 256 $\times$ 256 images of food conditioned on their recipes. The relation between the recipe text (without its title) to the visual content of the image is vague, and the tex…
Cookpad Ltd.（Cookpad有限公司）；Facebook（脸书）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
We propose a novel non-parametric method for cross-modal recipe retrieval which is applied on top of precomputed image and text embeddings. By combining our method with standard approaches for building image and text encoders, trained independently with a self-supervised classification objective, we create a baseline model which outperforms most existing methods on a challenging image-to-recipe task. We also use our method for comparing image and text encoders trained using different modern approaches, thus addressing the issues hindering the development of novel methods for cross-modal recipe…
Vietnam is such an attractive tourist destination with its stunning and pristine landscapes and its top-rated unique food and drink. Among thousands of Vietnamese dishes, foreigners and native people are interested in easy-to-eat tastes and easy-to-do recipes, along with reasonable prices, mouthwatering flavors, and popularity. Due to the diversity and almost all the dishes have significant similarities and the lack of quality Vietnamese food datasets, it is hard to implement an auto system to classify Vietnamese food, therefore, make people easier to discover Vietnamese food. This paper intro…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
It is widely acknowledged that learning joint embeddings of recipes with images is challenging due to the diverse composition and deformation of ingredients in cooking procedures. We present a Multi-modal Semantics enhanced Joint Embedding approach (MSJE) for learning a common feature space between the two modalities (text and image), with the ultimate goal of providing high-performance cross-modal retrieval services. Our MSJE approach has three unique features. First, we extract the TFIDF feature from the title, ingredients and cooking instructions of recipes. By determining the significance …
In this paper we want to address the problem of automation for recognition of photographed cooking dishes and generating the corresponding food recipes. Current image-to-recipe models are computation expensive and require powerful GPUs for model training and implementation. High computational cost prevents those existing models from being deployed on portable devices, like smart phones. To solve this issue we introduce a lightweight image-to-recipe prediction model, RecipeSnap, that reduces memory cost and computational cost by more than 90% while still achieving 2.0 MedR, which is in line wit…
Recipe generation from food images and ingredients is a challenging task, which requires the interpretation of the information from another modality. Different from the image captioning task, where the captions usually have one sentence, cooking instructions contain multiple sentences and have obvious structures. To help the model capture the recipe structure and avoid missing some cooking details, we propose a novel framework: Decomposing Generation Networks (DGN) with structure prediction, to get more structured and complete recipe generation outputs. Specifically, we split each cooking inst…
Training-Free Text-to-Image Compositional Food Generation via Prompt Grafting
Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University（电气与计算机工程学院，普渡大学）；Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo（系统设计工程系，滑铁卢大学）
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（亚洲 Salesforce 研究院）
Food image segmentation is a critical and indispensible task for developing health-related applications such as estimating food calories and nutrients. Existing food image segmentation models are underperforming due to two reasons: (1) there is a lack of high quality food image datasets with fine-grained ingredient labels and pixel-wise location masks -- the existing datasets either carry coarse ingredient labels or are small in size; and (2) the complex appearance of food makes it difficult to localize and recognize ingredients in food images, e.g., the ingredients may overlap one another in …
Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Prediction of Color Trajectories in Food Drying
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA（机械科学与工程系，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（机械工程系，密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Cross-modal recipe retrieval has attracted research attention in recent years, thanks to the availability of large-scale paired data for training. Nevertheless, obtaining adequate recipe-image pairs covering the majority of cuisines for supervised learning is difficult if not impossible. By transferring knowledge learnt from a data-rich cuisine to a data-scarce cuisine, domain adaptation sheds light on this practical problem. Nevertheless, existing works assume recipes in source and target domains are mostly originated from the same cuisine and written in the same language. This paper studies …
Beyond Images: Adaptive Fusion of Visual and Textual Data for Food Classification
Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, India（Motilal Nehru国立技术学院Allahabad分校）；Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India（印度理工学院Ropar分校）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
This paper introduces a two-phase deep feature calibration framework for efficient learning of semantics enhanced text-image cross-modal joint embedding, which clearly separates the deep feature calibration in data preprocessing from training the joint embedding model. We use the Recipe1M dataset for the technical description and empirical validation. In preprocessing, we perform deep feature calibration by combining deep feature engineering with semantic context features derived from raw text-image input data. We leverage LSTM to identify key terms, NLP methods to produce ranking scores for k…
We present a novel method for aligning a sequence of instructions to a video of someone carrying out a task. In particular, we focus on the cooking domain, where the instructions correspond to the recipe. Our technique relies on an HMM to align the recipe steps to the (automatically generated) speech transcript. We then refine this alignment using a state-of-the-art visual food detector, based on a deep convolutional neural network. We show that our technique outperforms simpler techniques based on keyword spotting. It also enables interesting applications, such as automatically illustrating r…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers（法国国立工艺学院）
Designing powerful tools that support cooking activities has rapidly gained popularity due to the massive amounts of available data, as well as recent advances in machine learning that are capable of analyzing them. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal retrieval model aligning visual and textual data (like pictures of dishes and their recipes) in a shared representation space. We describe an effective learning scheme, capable of tackling large-scale problems, and validate it on the Recipe1M dataset containing nearly 1 million picture-recipe pairs. We show the effectiveness of our approach r…
Understanding and reasoning about cooking recipes is a fruitful research direction towards enabling machines to interpret procedural text. In this work, we introduce RecipeQA, a dataset for multimodal comprehension of cooking recipes. It comprises of approximately 20K instructional recipes with multiple modalities such as titles, descriptions and aligned set of images. With over 36K automatically generated question-answer pairs, we design a set of comprehension and reasoning tasks that require joint understanding of images and text, capturing the temporal flow of events and making sense of pro…
Multi-Modal Fusion of In-Situ Video Data and Process Parameters for Online Forecasting of Cookie Drying Readiness
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校机械科学与工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan（密歇根大学机械工程系）
