Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Ingredients Identification

In recent years, with the development of artificial intelligence, smart catering has become one of the most popular research fields, where ingredients identification is a necessary and significant link. The automatic identification of ingredients can effectively reduce labor costs in the acceptance stage of the catering process. Although there have been a few methods for ingredients classification, most of them are of low recognition accuracy and poor flexibility. In order to solve these problems, in this paper, we construct a large-scale fresh ingredients database and design an end-to-end multi-attention-based convolutional neural network model for ingredients identification. Our method achieves an accuracy of 95.90% in the classification task, which contains 170 kinds of ingredients. The experiment results indicate that it is the state-of-the-art method for the automatic identification of ingredients. In addition, considering the sudden addition of some new categories beyond our training list in actual applications, we introduce an open-set recognition module to predict the samples outside the training set as the unknown ones. The accuracy of open-set recognition reaches 74.6%. Our algorithm has been deployed successfully in smart catering systems. It achieves an average accuracy of 92% in actual use and saves 60% of the time compared to manual operation, according to the statistics of actual application scenarios.