Projection Mapping for Enhancing the Perceived Deliciousness of Food

The perceived deliciousness of a food item is highly related to its appearance. Image processing has been widely used to make food images more appealing to the public, such as when capturing and posting images on social networking sites. This paper proposes a methodology and a system to enhance the degree of subjective deliciousness perceived by a person based on the appearance of a real-food item by changing its appearance in a real environment. First, an online questionnaire survey was conducted to analyze the appearance factors that make food look delicious by using various food images. Based on this knowledge, a prototype system, which projects a computer-generated image onto the food item, was constructed for enhancing its subjective degree of deliciousness based on its appearance at a pixel level. Finally, a user study was conducted in which the subjective degree of deliciousness based on the food appearance was compared under various appearance modification conditions. The results show that appropriate chroma and partial-color modifications highly increase this degree of deliciousness, thus implying that the proposed system can successfully be used to improve the appearance of food to make it look more delicious.