Google's Im2Calories AI technology can approximately count the calories inside an image depicting food

Jun 3, 2015 09:27 GMT  ·  By

Google has moved to file a patent for Im2Calories, a technology developed in-house that analyzes food photos and estimates the amount of calories for that meal.

Im2Calories relies on a series of artificial intelligence algorithms and photo processing tools that, while not entirely accurate, will provide an approximate number of calories based on the provided image.

This new project was presented at the Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston and is still in the works at Google and awaited in the following years.

We expect to see Im2Calories in a future Android and iOS app

The most obvious use case for this would be a mobile app since both Twitter and Instagram started out as sites where people were most of the time bragging about what they were eating or had just enjoyed.

Since Google has been slowly rolling down Google+, expect Im2Calories to be packed as a standalone service, or as an add-on for Instagram or other types of similar apps.

There are other similar applications on both the iOS and Android app stores, but expect Google to produce a much better tool because, let's face it, few companies in the world are better at AI than Google is.

Google's increasing concern for your health

As companies reveal innovation after innovation, we tend to observe trends in their general direction, their main areas of concern, how past acquisitions have helped, and what future ventures are more likely to take place.

For Google, it's easy to observe a clear line of interest the company has taken in providing health-related services for their users.

The company previously released Google Fit, a physical fitness tracking platform for Android, and also announced Baseline Study in 2014, a Google [x] project that has recently released the Study Kit Web, iOS, and Android apps for helping users track their overall health.

Adding Im2Calories to the mix won't do but improve the quality of these apps, and clearly put it above Microsoft and Apple on this forefront.