A Coarse-to-Fine Feature Aggregation Neural Network with a Boundary-Aware Module for Accurate Food Recognition

Food recognition from images is crucial for dietary management, enabling applications like automated meal tracking and personalized nutrition planning. However, challenges such as background noise disrupting intra-class consistency, inter-class distinction, and domain shifts due to variations in capture angles, lighting, and image resolution persist. This study proposes a multi-stage convolutional neural network-based framework incorporating a boundary-aware module (BAM) for boundary region perception, deformable ROI pooling (DRP) for spatial feature refinement, a transformer encoder for capturing global contextual relationships, and a NetRVLAD module for robust feature aggregation. The framework achieved state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, with Top-1 accuracies of 99.80% on the Food-5k dataset, 99.17% on the Food-101 dataset, and 85.87% on the Food-2k dataset, significantly outperforming existing methods. This framework holds promise as a foundational tool for intelligent dietary management, offering robust and accurate solutions for real-world applications.