ISSAI paper “Central Asian Food Dataset for Personalized Dietary Interventions” by Karabay A, Bolatov A, Varol HA, Chan M-Y. A has been accepted to the Nutrients, an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal from MDPI.

In the paper, authors present a reliable dataset of regional foods in Central Asia that is easily accessible to both public consumers and researchers. The proposed dataset can be used to develop personalized dietary plans, optimize production processes, enable personalized dietary interventions and improve food quality and safety. The topic is particularly interesting as a recent study showed that the burden of diet-related deaths in Central Asia is among the highest in the world.

The abstract of the paper is below:

Nowadays, it is common for people to take photographs of every beverage, snack, or meal they eat and then post these photographs on social media platforms. Leveraging these social trends, real-time food recognition and reliable classification of these captured food images can potentially help replace some of the tedious recording and coding of food diaries to enable personalized dietary interventions. Although Central Asian cuisine is culturally and historically distinct, there has been little published data on the food and dietary habits of people in this region. To fill this gap, we aim to create a reliable dataset of regional foods that is easily accessible to both public consumers and researchers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the creation of a Central Asian Food Dataset (CAFD). The final dataset contains 42 food categories and over 16,000 images of national dishes unique to this region. We achieved a classification accuracy of 88.70% (42 classes) on the CAFD using the ResNet152 neural network model. The food recognition models trained on the CAFD demonstrate the effectiveness and high accuracy of computer vision for dietary assessment.

Link to the paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/7/1728

Link to the GitHub repository: https://github.com/IS2AI/Central-Asian-Food-Dataset

Link to the Dataset: https://issai.nu.edu.kz/wp-content/themes/issai-new/data/models/CAFD/CAFD.zip

Link to paper videos: [EN] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsUMI6dRdO8; [KZ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Kx3XhED3o