App that can count calories in your food pics

New York, June 7: Google recently unveiled an app at a tech conference in Boston that can guess the number of calories in your Instagram food photos.

Im2Calories is an artificial intelligence software that uses algorithms to estimate the number of calories in your Instagram food photos, Popular Science reported.

"The idea behind the project is to simplify the process of keeping a food diary, eliminating the need to manually plug your foods and serving sizes into an app," Google research scientist Kevin Murphy said.

The system gauges the size of pieces of food in relation to the plate to generate a calories estimate, and the user will have the option to approve or disapprove and make corrections if the software misreads your pics.

"We're going to average over a week or a month or a year. And now we can start to potentially join information from multiple people and start to do population level statistics," Murphy was quoted as saying.

According to Murphy, the technology has other possible uses too, if it comes out successful in its current usage.

It' not clear as yet when Im2Calories will be available.

IANS