Integrated Hierarchical and Flat Classifiers for Food Image Classification using Epistemic Uncertainty

The problem of food image recognition is an essential one in today’s context because health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease require constant monitoring of a person’s diet. To automate this process, several models are available to recognize food images. Due to a considerable number of unique food dishes and various cuisines, a traditional flat classifier ceases to perform well. To address this issue, prediction schemes consisting of both flat and hierarchical classifiers, with the analysis of epistemic uncertainty are used to switch between the classifiers. However, the accuracy of the predictions made using epistemic uncertainty data remains considerably low. Therefore, this paper presents a prediction scheme using three different threshold criteria that helps to increase the accuracy of epistemic uncertainty predictions. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated using several experiments performed on the MAFood-121 dataset. The experimental results validate the proposal performance and show that the proposed threshold criteria help to increase the overall accuracy of the predictions by correctly classifying the uncertainty distribution of the samples.