Non-Destructive Frying Oil Oxidation Assessment

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22 papers

Latest in Non-Destructive Frying Oil Oxidation Assessment

Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

A Conservative OCR-Enabled Workflow for R214 Sodium Screening of South African Packaged Foods

Using food package images to monitor sodium and salt content against South Africa's R214 sodium limits is challenging when screening decisions require product identity, nutrition facts panel evidence, reporting basis, and category-specific thresholds. This study presents a conservative image-based workflow that combines region detection, optical character recognition (OCR), product identity and sodium evidence extraction, R214 category assignment, deterministic threshold comparison, and independent vision language model comparison. The evaluation used 442 packaged food products and 3 929 full package images from a real-world South African food packaging dataset. A YOLO26s small detector generated 4 195 region crops, and strict post-processing produced one sodium evidence row per product. The integrated workflow produced 290 OUTSIDE R214 SCOPE, 139 REVIEW, seven SCREEN-PASS, and six SCREEN-FAIL outcomes. The independent Qwen2.5-VL 7B vision language model workflow produced 387 OUTSIDE R214 SCOPE, 31 REVIEW, twenty SCREEN-PASS, and four SCREEN-FAIL outcomes. The workflows agreed on exact R214 category assignment for 415 of 442 products (93.9%) and on whether the assigned category was within R214 scope for 416 of 442 products (94.1%). Final screening outcome agreement was 307 out of 442 products, or 69.5%. Manual verification on 60 products showed lower strict outcome agreement than regulated status agreement, while all manual INSUFFICIENT DATA cases were kept out of SCREEN-PASS and SCREEN-FAIL by both automated workflows. The findings show that conservative image-based screening can organise package evidence, identify clear cases, and assign uncertain cases to REVIEW rather than forcing SCREEN-PASS or SCREEN-FAIL decisions.
Mayimunah Nagayi, Alice Scaria Khan, Tamryn Frank +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

Population-level measures of perceived food access reveal barriers beyond geographic proximity

Food access is multidimensional, but population-level measurement still relies heavily on geography because perceived dimensions of access are difficult to measure at scale. Here, we use 25,125 Google Maps reviews from 49 grocery stores in Raleigh, North Carolina, to measure five dimensions of food access: availability, accessibility, affordability, accommodation, and acceptability. We identify review topics with unsupervised topic modeling and assign them to access dimensions using zero-shot classification, with 85.4% agreement against manual coding. The resulting store-level measures capture distinct aspects of food access and reveal barriers that geographic proximity alone does not capture. Comparisons between nearby stores in the same chain further show that identical store policies can be perceived very differently across locations, consistent with food access reflecting the fit between residents and their food environment. Perceived food access also follows systematic socioeconomic and demographic patterns that broadly parallel, but do not replicate, those observed for geographic access. These results show that online grocery reviews can provide a scalable complement to geographic measures of food access.
Teresa Groton, Benjamin rachunok
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

CulturalMenuBench: Probing the Knowledge-Application Gap in Multimodal Culinary Reasoning

Multimodal language models achieve near-ceiling scores on food recognition benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether this success reflects genuine cultural understanding or mere visual matching. To probe this distinction, we introduce CulturalMenuBench, a benchmark of 4,870 items in 10 languages across 18 regions; its 10 tasks pair final-dish and step-by-step cooking images with ingredients, procedural text, and regional labels, spanning basic recognition to process-grounded cultural attribution. Evaluating 12 models exposes a substantial knowledge-application gap: models exceeding 94% on standard multiple-choice tasks drop to at most 56% when attributing dishes to Chinese regional cuisines, despite an identical four-way format. Diagnostic analyses explain why: error patterns are consistent with random guessing, accuracy tracks visual distinctiveness rather than cultural structure, and models classify cuisines more accurately from dish names alone than from images (+7-18 points). The knowledge is thus present but cannot be activated through visual input. An ablation confirms these tasks genuinely require procedural evidence: removing sequential cooking images selectively degrades process-grounded tasks while others remain stable. Overall, CulturalMenuBench shows that near-perfect recognition can conceal an inability to apply cultural knowledge, motivating training that explicitly connects perception, procedure, and cultural context. Code and data are publicly available.
Bo Zeng, Linfeng Gao, Peiqin Lin +9
Aug 20, 2026cs.LG

Decision Tree and K-Means Analysis of Raman Spectra for Edible Oils: A Physics-Informed AI Approach

Classification of edible oils in processed foods is important for food quality, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance. This study develops a Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive framework integrating spectral organization, interpretable classification, Physics-Informed Artificial Intelligence (PI-AI), and Frugal AI-based feature reduction. Five edible oils were analyzed in pure form and within a fried-potato-chip matrix using t-SNE, K-means clustering, Decision Trees, and Non-Negative Least Squares (NNLS)-based spectral decomposition. Unsupervised analyses showed stronger class organization and separability in pure oils, while food-matrix effects caused substantial spectral overlap. Decision Trees achieved 100% classification accuracy for pure oils using only four Raman variables from 1866 spectral features. These variables represented only 0.21% of the available spectral information while retaining perfect test-set performance. Two variables associated with lipid unsaturation (about 1650 cm-1) and hydrocarbon-chain organization (about 1127 cm-1) remained important after NNLS matrix correction. Their combined contribution increased from 50% in pure oils to about 62% and 89% in paper-subtracted and paper-plus-potato-subtracted datasets, respectively. NNLS-based PI-AI improved food-matrix classification by separating oil signatures from paper and potato contributions. Optimized post-pruned models achieved nearly 80% test accuracy using only five and four Raman variables, respectively. The four-feature representation reduced the data footprint by 99.44% without loss of accuracy. These findings demonstrate that Raman-based oil identification can use compact, physically meaningful, and interpretable spectral representations, supporting Frugal AI, Edge AI, portable sensing, and embedded food-quality monitoring.
Amrita Shaw, Chandrasekar S. N., Sai Muthukumar V. +2
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

Few-Shot Ordinal Learning for Day-Wise Freshness Estimation with Hyperspectral Fish Images

Non-destructive food quality assessment has increasingly benefited from hyperspectral imaging (HSI), which captures spectral signatures linked to biochemical changes during storage. Estimating day-wise freshness, however, remains challenging owing to strong inter-fillet variability and scarce labelled data per product. All existing deep learning approaches for HSI-based freshness prediction operate under full supervision, requiring densely annotated training sets that are costly to obtain at the individual-product level. We introduce, to the best of our knowledge, the first few-shot learning framework for HSI-based food quality estimation. Each fillet defines a distinct episodic task, and a CORAL-style ordinal prediction head captures the ranked nature of freshness progression through cumulative threshold modelling. Biologically grounded monotonicity and embedding smoothness constraints further guide predictions toward plausible trajectories. On a 16-day salmon HSI dataset under a strict unseen-fillet protocol, our method achieves a mean absolute error of 1.58 days and 2-day accuracy of 72.3% with only three labelled days per fillet, substantially outperforming scalar regression and label-distribution baselines under an identical unseen-fillet protocol.
Kazi Nabiul Alam, Pooneh Bagheri Zadeh, Akbar Sheikh-Akbari
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

Automated binary classification of hazelnut X-ray images: A deep-learning benchmark for quality assessment

Non-destructive X-ray imaging can reveal internal hazelnut defects that are difficult to detect by external inspection alone; however, automated interpretation remains challenging because of subtle radiographic differences among classes, marked class imbalance, and limited annotated data. Here, we present a benchmark for binary hazelnut quality classification (healthy versus defective) based on 799 segmented single-kernel X-ray images (224 x 224 pixels, grayscale), grouped into 101 acquisition units. Seven single-model configurations and ten probability-aggregation ensembles were evaluated using a group-wise split-rotation protocol across five data splits generated using different random seeds. Decision thresholds were selected on the validation set, and performance was assessed deterministically on validation and test sets. Under the expert-reassessed annotation condition, the average-probability ensemble of the binary cross-entropy-trained convolutional neural network and frozen Swin Transformer achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy (86.3% +/- 1.8%, five seeds), with several other ensembles providing comparable performance. Across methods, substantial split-to-split variability was observed, indicating that multi-split evaluation is essential for reliable model comparison at this dataset scale. Expert reassessment of ambiguous samples improved the performance of all 17 evaluated methods by 2.8-8.1 percentage points, while having only a limited effect on cross-split variance. The results highlight both the potential of deep learning for automated X-ray-based hazelnut quality assessment and the importance of rigorous evaluation and label curation in small, imbalanced agricultural imaging datasets.
Giancarlo Sportelli, Nicola Belcari, Roberta Pace +4
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

SAR2Agri: Learning SAR Intensity Representations for Agricultural Monitoring

Agricultural monitoring faces unique challenges, arising from the landscape's complex temporal, phenological, and climate dynamics, yet monitoring them is critical for ensuring food security. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites offer all-weather day-night imaging capability supporting key monitoring tasks including crop type mapping, yield prediction and phenological event detection. Existing multimodal remote sensing foundation models including TerraMind and CopernicusFM learn SAR representations by grounding them in optical imagery using joint encoding and contrastive learning techniques, while SAR-specific foundation models such as SAR-JEPA, SARMAE, and SAR-W-MixMAE primarily focus on target detection, flood mapping, and land cover classification applications. Recent work has introduced phenology inspired temporal pretext tasks with optical imagery which has shown strong performance on agricultural downstream tasks. In this work, we propose the first self-supervised learning pipeline focused on using only SAR intensity imagery for agricultural applications. We improve the temporal pretext tasks through masking and curriculum learning to enhance the pretraining pipeline's ability to capture phenological features from SAR. On the SICKLE benchmark, our final model achieves 84.9% IoU on crop type mapping, outperforming optical baselines (by 15.3 pt) and existing SAR baselines (by 2.2 pt), demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline for pretraining SAR intensity encoders for agricultural monitoring.
Moti Rattan Gupta, Anupam Sobti
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

OliveGemma: A 3 Billion Visual Language Model for Recognising the Mediterranean & European Diet

Image based dietary assessment offers a scalable alternative to self reported food diaries, yet fine-grained food recognition remains challenging due to high intra-class variability and visually similar dishes. This study presents OliveGemma, a vision language model for recognising and reasoning about Mediterranean and European cuisine. Built on the open-weight PaliGemma-2-3B architecture, OliveGemma is fine-tuned with LoRA on a unified corpus of 17,340 images from three European research project datasets (MedGR, ODIN, and VIPPSTAR), reconciled into a vocabulary of 216 composed dish categories and paired with 102,642 instruction style question-answer items covering dish recognition, likely and visible ingredients, class boundary discrimination, visual evidence and overall visual food understanding. Under a 3-fold cross-validation scheme, OliveGemma achieves a top-1 accuracy of 92.96% +/- 0.91%, exceeding the strongest CNN baseline (DenseNet-121) by 7.31% and outperforming zero-shot frontier models with exact instructions and bounded classes including Gemini Flash 3 and 3.5, GPT-5.4 Mini, and Claude Haiku 4.6 by 8%, 46%, and 64% respectively. Furthermore, OliveGemma demonstrates competitive performance on Top-3 and Top-5 accuracy, being second best across CNNs and frontier models, surpassed only by DenseNet-121. In addition, OliveGemma achieves 90.79% +/- 1.3% Exact-Set on the likely ingredients of the food categories. These results demonstrate that PEFT adaptation of a small VLM can surpass substantially larger proprietary models on specialised food recognition. The model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/JamesZar/OliveGemma-3B and the experiments and results can be found at https://github.com/tsiokris/OliveGemma.
Dimitrios I. Zaridis, Traianos Tsiokris, Vasileios C. Pezoulas +6
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

Leveraging AI for fine-grained food safety risk forecasting in sparse data conditions

Ensuring food safety represents a critical public health challenge, particularly when inspection resources are limited and regional sampling data are sparse. This study proposes a Transformer-based framework capable of forecasting fine-grained, city-level food safety risks by unifying over 11 million inspection records with supplemental demographic, economic, and environmental indicators extracted from the Statistical Yearbook. A three-stage pretraining design leverages partial supervision from the Wilson interval (capturing both safety and risk rankings), together with semi-supervised label refinement, to effectively utilize historical records even when local sample sizes are insufficient. Experimental evaluations on data from 2022 show that the proposed approach outperforms baselines significantly. A subsequent field experiment in collaboration with the Zhejiang Provincial Administration for Market Regulation further demonstrates improved detection rates and more efficient allocation of inspection resources compared to a manually developed plan. Observations of regulatory decision-making reveal a threshold-based heuristic employed by inspectors, hinting that additional training or decision-support interfaces could further enhance the impact of AI-generated risk scores. Overall, these findings underscore that a rigorous integration of large-scale public inspection data, Wilson interval-based confidence modeling, and advanced deep learning can facilitate earlier and more granular identification of food safety threats. By reducing reliance on reactive measures alone, the proposed framework has the potential to advance proactive, data-driven oversight of the global food supply.
Dongqi Wang, Weiwei Chen, Han Zhou +1
Jul 30, 2026stat.ML

Robust Wavelength Selection for Partial Least Squares Sugar Content Estimation Using Combinatorial Bayesian Optimization

Wavelength selection is one of the important preprocessing methods in near-infrared spectroscopy to improve prediction accuracy and interpretability of spectral data. We formulate wavelength-region selection for sugar content estimation as a binary black-box optimization problem and propose a method based on Bayesian optimization. The proposed method constructs a sparse quadratic surrogate model and sequentially extracts interested wavelength regions by Thompson sampling. Minimizing an acquisition function is performed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem by simulated or quantum annealing. Experiments show that the proposed method improves the prediction accuracy of partial least squares regression and yields more consistent wavelength regions than genetic-algorithm-based selection and simulated annealing. Under one-bit local perturbations, the selected wavelength regions show minimal fluctuations in root mean square errors between observed and predicted values of a validation set. This local stability suggests that our method converges to a smoother error landscape and avoids isolated overfitted solutions. These results indicate that combinatorial Bayesian optimization is a useful framework for robust feature selection in spectroscopic prediction tasks.
Mitsunobu Kanebako, Ami S. Koshikawa, Masaru Hitomi +4
Jul 25, 2026cs.CV

DishSeg24k: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Food Segmentation with Stochastic Expert Decoding

Food segmentation is essential for applications such as intelligent catering, dietary assessment, and recommendation. However, existing benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of real-world dining scenes. The challenges of dense inter-dish overlap, fine-grained class similarity, and extreme long-tail class distributions exceed the fidelity of current datasets. To fill this gap, we introduce \textbf{DishSeg24k}, a large-scale dish-level segmentation benchmark with 24,096 images, 112,281 instances, and 278 fine-grained categories in real-world dining environments. Based on DishSeg24k, we further propose \textbf{Food Expert-Adaptive Segmentation Transformers (FEAST)} to address these challenges. FEAST models query-based decoding as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where each decoder layer update is treated as a sequential decision step that explores uncertainty along dish boundaries. We further redesign the decoder with a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module, in which a dual-critic decoupled optimization scheme separates task-oriented query refinement from structure-aware expert routing. This design promotes expert specialization and prevents expert collapse under long-tail category distributions. Finally, extensive experiments on DishSeg24k demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of FEAST, which outperforms previous methods by {+3.21%} mIoU, {+3.68%} mDice, and {+4.00%} mAcc, respectively. We further validate the effectiveness of FEAST on FoodSeg103. The dataset and code will be publicly released.
Yilin Wang, Haochen Shi, Guanyu Chen +4
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Joint Utilization of Geospatial and census proxies for Autoencoder-Assisted Downscaling (JUGAAD) of socioeconomic indicators in India

Monitoring poverty and food security indicators is imperative for addressing socioeconomic challenges in developing nations. A limitation is mismatches in scale between data sources: census data provide geographic coverage, while socioeconomic indicators are derived from infrequently conducted surveys at coarse resolutions, posing a methodological challenge. This study introduces a deep learning framework, JuGAAD, using Indian census and survey data from 2001 and 2011 as a case study. We employ a three-step process: census and geospatial data are averaged into intermediate village-cluster-scale tessellations to reduce noise and regularize administrative boundary changes; an autoencoder compresses high-dimensional National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data into a low-dimensional latent representation; and a regression model maps upscaled census and geospatial data to this representation. This function is applied to fine-grained census data to generate high-resolution predictions, validated against ground-truth district-level NSSO indicators. Results confirm the methodology predicts socioeconomic indicators at fine scales with strong accuracy.
Aditya Dutt, Paul Gader, Aditya Singh
Jun 26, 2026cs.RO

Robotic Arm-Based Spectral Sensing for Strawberry Positioning and Non-Destructive Sweetness Measurement

Accurate assessment of sweetness is essential for quality control in agriculture, yet conventional methods rely on destructive sampling and are difficult to scale. This thesis presents a robotic arm-based spectral sensing system for strawberry detection, localization, approach, and non-destructive sweetness estimation. The system integrates perception, calibration, and robotic control in a closed-loop pipeline. A YOLOv11s detector is adopted for real-time strawberry detection, while RGB-ToF calibration and mask-to-depth alignment are used to obtain geometrically consistent target localization. A custom eye-in-hand hand-eye calibration workflow is developed to estimate the rigid transform between gripper_link and cam_front, enabling reliable transformation of fruit targets into the robot base frame. Based on these estimates, the robot executes a waypoint-based search and an incremental closed-loop approach strategy to position the sensor at optimal working distance for sweetness sensing. Experimental results show strong end-to-end performance (88.10% success over 42 trials), with robust detection (95.24%) and successful approach execution once a target is detected (100% conditional success). Hand-eye calibration comparisons indicate that although Andreff yields the smallest translation norm in single-run results, the Park method provides better cross-sample consistency and therefore more stable downstream robot behavior. The residual failures are concentrated in the sensing stage, especially valid-region extraction for sweetness estimation under difficult depth/reflectance conditions. Overall, this work demonstrates the feasibility of integrating RGB-ToF perception, robotic manipulation, and non-destructive sensing for practical strawberry quality assessment, and provides a scalable baseline for future integration of learning-based policies such as Vision-Language-Action models.
Yi Yang, Mark Cardamis, Wen Hu
Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

Batch-Invariant Spectral Intelligence for Robust and Explainable Insect Authentication

Edible insects offer an efficient source of alternative protein, requiring less land, water and emitting less greenhouse gas than conventional livestock. However, their successful integration into the food supply chain demands reliable species authentication to control allergen exposure, prevent adulteration, and meet regulatory standards. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a rapid analytical tool, but its performance drops when applied to production batches unseen during training due to batch-to-batch variation in spectral measurements. We introduce the Batch-Invariant Spectral Network (BISN), an end-to-end framework that combines a learnable preprocessing module, initialised with Savitzky-Golay filtering, with an entropy-regularised adversarial objective to suppress batch-specific spectral variation. In contrast to Domain-Adversarial Neural Networks, which enforce domain adaptation only after feature extraction, BISN suppress batch-effects before species-specific features are learned. Using 2,700 spectra from three species (Acheta domesticus, Hermetia illucens, and Tenebrio molitor) collected across three independent production batches, BISN achieves a mean leave-one-batch-out accuracy of 0.93 (standard deviation 0.04), outperforming the strongest baseline by four percent. Further insights gained by using explainable AI confirm that model decisions consistently rely on the lipid and protein absorption regions across all folds, connecting predictive performance to known insect biochemistry. BISN addresses both cross-batch robustness and biochemical interpretability for automated insect species authentication under realistic industrial conditions. The source code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/majharB/bisn.
Majharulislam Babor, Giacomo Rossi, Annalisa Altavilla +2
Jun 23, 2026cs.CV

Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness

Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.
Jonesh Shrestha
Jun 16, 2026q-bio.OT

Protein-Based Fish Species Identification: Dataset, Models, and Insights from Native Bangladeshi Fish

Correct identification of fish species is highly significant for food security, economic development, and climate resilience in Bangladesh. Protein sequences directly reflect functional and evolutionary constraints which are important for species authentication and biodiversity monitoring. Yet there exists no benchmark for native Bangladeshi fish species identification from protein sequence. In this study, we addressed this gap by introducing the first curated dataset for nine native Bangladeshi fish species of 2845 high quality protein sequences. We also established the first protein sequence classification baseline for this domain through a systematic benchmarking of seven architectural paradigms. Moreover, we propose a realistic deployable novel hybrid architecture of MotifCNN and Transformer with Terminal-Aware Positional-Encoding (MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE). Our novel architecture achieves 79.80% accuracy with macro-F1 of 0.80. The highest 83.04% accuracy is achieved by finetuned protein language model ProtBERT that has 420M parameters and requires dual 16GB GPUs for inference. According to McNemar's test, ProtBERT's 3.24% accuracy gain over our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is statistically insignificant (p = 0.1120). Our novel architecture beats it among six of the nine classes in per class identification. Also our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is approximately 5x faster, 42x smaller, and supports 16x larger batch size than ProtBERT and has GPU free inference, making it more practical for deployment in resources constrained areas such as rural Bangladesh. Beyond this, our foundational work shows effects of phylogenetic relationships on sequence similarity and establishes pathways for fisheries management, food authentication and biodiversity conservation in South Asia's protein dependent economy.
Md Nasiat Hasan Fahim, Md. Abid Ullah Muhib, Mohammad Shahidur Rahman
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Food-R1: A Unified Multi-Task Food Vision-Language Model with Reinforcement Learning

Recent studies have explored Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for food analysis. However, most existing methods rely primarily on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often limits reasoning and generalization capabilities. Moreover, high-quality large-scale nutritional annotations remain scarce. To address these issues, we introduce CalorieBench-80K, a large-scale benchmark with curated calorie labels and dietary advice annotations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first food image benchmark to incorporate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations for calorie reasoning. We also propose Food-R1, a unified food VLM trained in a multi-task learning paradigm to equip the model with broad capabilities. Food-R1 undergoes CoT-based cold-start instruction tuning, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve reasoning and performance. Experiments on CalorieBench-80K and representative benchmarks show that Food-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines across food-related tasks. The code, model weights, and benchmark annotations are available at the project repository.
Yu Zhu, Yongkang Li, Wenjie Zhu +5
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

PerBite: A Curated Diagnostic Workflow for Bite-Aware Food Volume Estimation

Can a visually plausible food mesh be trusted to estimate the volume of consumed food? \method investigates this question using selected paired before- and after-consumption states from the MetaFood CVPR 2026 Continuous 3D Reconstruction While Eating Challenge. The submitted workflow follows a curated reconstruction protocol: SAM3 segments the food and plate regions; Hunyuan3D/SAM3D generates a dimensionless food mesh; the plate diameter provides the metric scale; the plate geometry is removed in Blender; and the remaining mesh is hole-filled, made watertight, and integrated to estimate volume. MoGe-2 is used only as an auxiliary cue for initial dish-diameter estimation when direct plate measurement is uncertain; it is not the primary scale source for the reported challenge result. \method ranks first, with an average Chamfer distance of 8.31 across 34 meshes using rigid ICP without scale correction. On 17 before- and after-pairs, it achieves 33.87% state-level volume MAPE and zero monotonicity violations, while consumed-volume MAPE remains 53.74%. The results show that surface reconstruction, metric scale, controlled mesh cleanup, watertight volume integration, and physical depletion consistency should be evaluated separately for dietary assessment. Source code and evaluation scripts will be available at \href{https://github.com/GCVCG/PerBite-CVPR-MetaFood-2026}{github.com/GCVCG/PerBite-CVPR-MetaFood-2026}.
Ahmad AlMughrabi, Farid Al-Areqi, David Fernández Gómez +4
May 23, 2026cs.CV

FDDet: Achieving Data-Efficient Food Defect Detection Under Real-World Scenarios

Food defect detection is critical for automated quality control, yet existing studies lack unified benchmarks and suffer from data scarcity. We introduce FDD-48, a comprehensive dataset with fine-grained annotations across 13 food types and 48 defect categories under diverse real-world conditions. To improve detection with limited labeled data, we propose FDDet, a semi-supervised framework featuring two key components: (1) BBoxMixUp, a data augmentation technique that mixes same-category defect regions to reduce spurious feature associations, and (2) CGPC (Consistency-Guided Pseudo-Label Calibration), which filters pseudo-labels based on intra-sample consistency. Experiments show FDDet significantly outperforms mainstream detectors on FDD-48, demonstrating its effectiveness for food defect detection under data-limited scenarios.
Ruihao Xu, Yong Liu, Yansong Tang
May 6, 2026cs.AI

FoodCHA: Multi-Modal LLM Agent for Fine-Grained Food Analysis

The widespread adoption of camera-equipped mobile devices and wearables has enabled convenient capture of meal images, making food recognition a key component for real time dietary monitoring. However, real-world food images present challenges due to high intra-class similarity and the frequent presence of multiple food items within a single image. While deep learning models achieve strong performance in coarse grained classification, they often struggle to capture fine-grained attributes such as cooking style. Moreover, open-ended generation in modern vision-language models can produce non-canonical labels, limiting their practical deployment. We propose FoodCHA, a multimodal agentic framework that reformulates food recognition as a hierarchical decision-making process. By progressively anchoring predictions, FoodCHA guides subcategory identification using high-level categories and guides cooking style recognition using subcategories, improving semantic consistency and attribute-level discrimination. To ensure practical deployability, FoodCHA utilizes the compact Moondream-2B vision language model, which provides strong reasoning capability while maintaining lower computational and memory overhead. Experiments on FoodNExTDB show that FoodCHA outperforms Food-Llama-3.2-11B by 13.8% and 38.2% in category and subcategory recognition precision, respectively, and achieves a striking 153.2% improvement in cooking style classification precision.
Woojin Lee, Pranav Mekkoth, Ye Tian +2
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Do Foundation Model Embeddings Improve Cross-Country Crop Yield Generalisation? A Leave-One-Country-Out Evaluation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Accurate predictions of smallholder maize yields across national boundaries are critical for food security planning in sub-Saharan Africa, yet most published benchmarks report within-country performance that overstates true generalisability. This paper evaluates whether geospatial foundation model embeddings, specifically Prithvi-EO-1.0-100M and ViT-Base, outperform traditional Sentinel-2 spectral features under a Leave-One-Country-Out cross-validation scheme on 6,404 maize field observations from five African countries. The results show a clear generalisability gap: within-country random cross-validation yields moderate R^2 values, but all feature sets perform poorly under cross-country testing, with universally negative R^2. Frozen Prithvi-EO embeddings provide no meaningful advantage over engineered spectral features for cross-country prediction in this setting. The paper argues that the main limitation is a shift in yield distribution between countries rather than representation quality and releases a reproducible negative benchmark for future work.
Yaw Osei Adjei
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

FryNet: Dual-Stream Adversarial Fusion for Non-Destructive Frying Oil Oxidation Assessment

Monitoring frying oil degradation is critical for food safety, yet current practice relies on destructive wet-chemistry assays that provide no spatial information and are unsuitable for real-time use. We identify a fundamental obstacle in thermal-image-based inspection, the camera-fingerprint shortcut, whereby models memorize sensor-specific noise and thermal bias instead of learning oxidation chemistry, collapsing under video-disjoint evaluation. We propose FryNet, a dual-stream RGB-thermal framework that jointly performs oil-region segmentation, serviceability classification, and regression of four chemical oxidation indices (PV, p-AV, Totox, temperature) in a single forward pass. A ThermalMiT-B2 backbone with channel and spatial attention extracts thermal features, while an RGB-MAE Encoder learns chemically grounded representations via masked autoencoding and chemical alignment. Dual-Encoder DANN adversarially regularizes both streams against video identity via Gradient Reversal Layers, and FiLM fusion bridges thermal structure with RGB chemical context. On 7,226 paired frames across 28 frying videos, FryNet achieves 98.97% mIoU, 100% classification accuracy, and 2.32 mean regression MAE, outperforming all seven baselines.
Khaled R Ahmed, Toqi Tahamid Sarker, Taminul Islam +2