Attention guided approach for food type and state recognition

Advancements in computer vision have resulted in significant breakthroughs across various applications, and one notable area of progress is in the recognition of food ingredient types and states. The identification of food items, distinguishing between types like oranges or apples, and assessing their states, whether whole, peeled, sliced, or juiced, is a pivotal task with far-reaching implications for fields such as food safety, recipe analysis, and restaurant quality control. This paper introduces an innovative approach to food type and state recognition that capitalizes on attention mechanisms and incorporates mask fusion to improve the accuracy and robustness of the recognition process. We evaluate the proposed approach through quantitative and qualitative analyses and comparisons to previous methods. The results consistently demonstrate that our proposed approach, integrating attention mechanisms, outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art methods, achieving an accuracy of 87.11%. This achievement signifies a step forward in refining food image segmentation models and reinforces the applicability of advanced techniques in real-world scenarios.