>If it seems impossible that an app could recognize food types, consider that software can already recognize faces, voices, specific songs, and fingerprints. Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder.
Assuming "broccoli" is a stand-in for "arbitrary food", that's one of the most wrong things I've ever seen Scott Adams say. Vision is a really hard problem, and there's far more variance in the appearance of food than there is in those of faces or fingerprints. (Recognizing songs is a non-sequitur.)
Perhaps if anything that wasn't just a 'wrapper match' could be farmed out to Mechanical Turk. You could charge a monthly fee high enough to cover the identification, and increase your profit margin as your recognition gets better.
Well if we limit the visual input to the realms of visible light then maybe not, but what if your camera could recognize other frequencies, like infrared and the brocoli gave off a unique set of frequencies that allowed it to be identified. Also the app doesn't need to know about everything, just everything food related, and not even all of it just the major.
It would also need a way to measure weight. It's all fair enough saying it's broccoli but you also need to say how much.
There are tons of probably-unsolvable problems with the idea (how can you tell if something has cream filling from a picture?), but what I'm saying is that even the vision one, which Adams explicitly seems to think is solvable, isn't.
Well if we limit the visual input to the realms of visible light then maybe not, but what if your camera could recognize other frequencies, like infrared and the brocoli gave off a unique set of frequencies that allowed it to be identified
That could work, except it's completely and awfully wrong. Don't they teach physics anymore?
Assuming "broccoli" is a stand-in for "arbitrary food", that's one of the most wrong things I've ever seen Scott Adams say. Vision is a really hard problem, and there's far more variance in the appearance of food than there is in those of faces or fingerprints. (Recognizing songs is a non-sequitur.)