Google would soon tell you the calories you ate from your Instagram food pictures

All the Instagram food pictures making you hungry? Google has now introduced a new technology that could be a boon to all the weight watchers, albeit a slight buzzkill for all food lovers. The tech giant has introduced an artificial intelligence project called Im2Calories that is capable of counting the number of calories in every item on a person’s plate simply by examining a photo.

Im2Calories uses visual analysis and pattern recognition to identify food items and then ascertain the calorie amount to each item. Google research lab’s Kevin Murphy says that the AI project uses ‘sophisticated deep learning algorithms’ to calculate the correct calorie data, Popular Science reports.

“To me, it’s obvious that people really want this and this is really useful. OK, 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. And now we can start to potentially join information from multiple people and start to do population level statistics,” Murphy told the publication.

The project is in its very early stages and research to refine it further is still ongoing, but Murphy asserts that Im2Calories will learn to read calories more accurately as more shared photos are scanned by the artificial intelligence tech over time. The current technology, Murphy claims, can even recognize condiments in a photo, and works perfectly fine on a low-resolution picture as well, perfect for your Instagram shots.

Apart from being a boon to weight watchers, Murphy states that this technology could be applied to other situations like analyzing traffic patterns to help people find parking spots. Google has filed a patent for Im2Calories, but there’s no clarity on when it will be widely available.

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