Brought to you by the same team who developed Apple’s Siri, this new app is still in its developmental phase. What if taking photos of your food could serve a real purpose besides helping you brag on Instagram and Facebook? SRI International, the lab responsible for the technology behind Siri, is developing an app that would let you snap a picture of your food to get an approximate calorie count, Gigaom reports. It would use image recognition to scan the photo and analyze the different components of your meal.
With obesity rates reaching scary levels, we really need a better way to let people know just how much food they are about to eat. There have been a few photo-based calorie counting apps like Meal Snap for a while, but this new development from SRI Ventures aims to make that process much more accurate. The new app is being developed under the code name Project Ceres and will attempt to correct some of the weaknesses in earlier similar apps. Using a large database of recognized food products, the app will be able to see not only that you’re about to chow down on a burger, but can tell when it’s a Burger King Double Whopper with cheese. Portion size has always been a tough job when photo analyzing food, so the SRI app will let you upload multiple pictures so it can get a better view of your plate. It even learns your habits and can recognize locations, so it will know when you’re stopping off at Ben & Jerry’s for a triple scoop sundae.
