Analyzing the Attractiveness of Food Images Using an Ensemble of Deep Learning Models Trained via Social Media Images

With the growth of digital media and social networks, sharing visual content has become common in people's daily lives. In the food industry, visually appealing food images can attract attention, drive engagement, and influence consumer behavior. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to understand what constitutes attractive food images. Assessing the attractiveness of food images poses significant challenges due to the lack of large labeled datasets that align with diverse public preferences. Additionally, it is challenging for computer assessments to approach human judgment in evaluating aesthetic quality. This paper presents a novel framework that circumvents the need for explicit human annotation by leveraging user engagement data that are readily available on social media platforms. We propose procedures to collect, filter, and automatically label the attractiveness classes of food images based on their user engagement levels. The data gathered from social media are used to create predictive models for category-specific attractiveness assessments. Our experiments across five food categories demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. The experimental results show that our proposed user-engagement-based attractiveness class labeling achieves a high consistency of 97.2% compared to human judgments obtained through A/B testing. Separate attractiveness assessment models were created for each food category using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). When analyzing unseen food images, our models achieve a consistency of 76.0% compared to human judgments. The experimental results suggest that the food image dataset collected from social networks, using the proposed framework, can be successfully utilized for learning food attractiveness assessment models.