Guys, the days of having to weigh out your food for calories is almost over. I mean, just imagine… You’ll be in a restaurant with that super skinny friend of yours who always looks like she just shot something for Vogue, and all you will have to do is take a photo of your food when it arrives and Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to calculate how many calories are in it. Then you can decide how much of it you want to eat so skinny-malinx over there doesn’t judge you for being a pig.

But seriously, AI is making some crazy advances.

Google research scientist Kevin Murphy unveiled a project that uses sophisticated deep learning algorithms to analyze a still photo of food, and estimate how many calories are on the plate.

How exactly does that work, though?

The system looked at an image, and counted two eggs, two pancakes and three strips of bacon. Since those aren’t exactly universal units of measurement, the system gauged the size of each piece of food, in relation to the plate, as well as any condiments.

The project is called ‘Im2Calories’ and its whole point is to simplify calorie counting. Murphy says that in the beginnning the program might “confuse fried eggs for poached” but that “if it only works 30% of the time, it’s enough that people will start using it, we’ll collect data, and it’ll get better over time”.

It will even be able to count calories from your Instagram photos! Just picture it: You’ll be sitting at Caprice eating your burger which you know you are going to photograph to death because they’re delicious and at the same time you’ll be told how many calories you’re about to eat. Talk about two birds, one stone.

You can read a lot more about what “deep learning” is HERE.

[Source: PopSci]