Google app will count calories in Instagram 'food porn'

It has become de rigueur these days to photograph your food before you eat it, as devotees of ‘food porn’ flock to Instagram in their thousands to share their latest gastronomic delights.

But soon, even looking at food will become a calorie-counting exercise, as Google responds to our appetites by developing an artificial intelligence project to calculate the calories in your latest Instagram post.

The Guardian reports that a prospective tool called Im2Calories, which aims to identify food snapped and work out the calorie content, has been announced at the Rework Deep Learning Summit held in Boston.

Google researcher Kevin P Murphy said the AI technology will analyse the depth of pixels in an image and employ “sophisticated deep-learning algorithms” to judge the size and shape of a foodstuff.

“To me it’s obvious that people really want this and this is really useful. Okay fine, maybe we get the calories off by 20%. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to average over a week or a month or a year.

“Now we can start to potentially join information from multiple people and start to do population-level statistics. I have colleagues in epidemiology and public health, and they really want this stuff,” said Murphy.

According to Popular Science, the company has recently filed a patent for the technology, but in comments to Cnet, Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds said algorithms for Im2Calories were still being researched, and that there were no definite product plans currently.