Voting combinations-based ensemble of fine-tuned convolutional neural networks for food image recognition

Obesity is one of today's most visible, uncared, and common public health problems worldwide. To manage weight loss, obtain calorie intake and record eating lists, the development of the diverse automatic dietary assessment applications has great importance. Recently, deep learning becomes a popular approach that provides outstanding image recognition results. In this paper, we use ResNet, GoogleNet, VGGNet, and InceptionV3 with fine-tuning based on deep learning for image-based and computer-aided food recognition task. We also apply six voting combination rules (namely, minimum probability, average of probabilities, median, maximum probability, product of probabilities, and weighted probabilities) for ensemble methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed ensemble voting scheme with transfer learning gives promising results compared to the state-of-the-art methods on Food-101, UEC-FOOD100, and UEC-FOOD256 image datasets.