this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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Cameras and computer vision aren't necessary. Food products already come with upcs. All you need is a barcode reader to input stuff and to track what you use in meals. Tracking what you use could also be used for meal planning.
Yeah, I did think of the barcode approach, but I didn't think anyone would be willing to scan every item, which is why I ignored it
However, revisiting this question made me realize that we could probably have the user scan receipts. It would take some doing but you could probably extract all the information from the receipt because it's in a fairly predictable format, and it's far less onerous.
OTOH, you still have to scan barcodes every time you cook with something, and you'd probably want some sort of mechanism to track partial consumption and leftovers, though a minimum viable product could work without that
The tough part, then, is scouring the internet for deals. Should be doable though.
Might try to slap something together tonight or tomorrow for that first bit, seems pretty easy, I bet you've got open source libraries for handling barcodes, and scanning receipts can probably just be done with existing OCR tech, error correction using minimum edit distance, and a few if statements to figure out which is the quantity and which is the item. That is, if my adhd doesn't cause me to forget
If you can also keep recipes in the system you could skip scanning the barcodes here. You'd just need to input how many servings you prepared and any waste. Even if the "recipe" is just "hot pocket" or something. If the system knows how much is in a package it can deduct what you use from the total and add it to the list when you need more.
Tracking what you use would be a lot easier with AI. Then you wouldn’t have to keep a barcode scanner in the kitchen. You could just have a camera pointed at your food prep space
is AI good enough to manage that with just a camera? how would it determine how much of a given product you uses? Like if you dump a cup of flour in a bowel, how does it know how much that was.
If you have to point the product in front of the camera to register it anyway, might as well use a barcode reader anyway because it's the same thing at that point just without the risk of the AI misidentifying something.