New tech puts the AI in dainty as it turns food pix into recipes

The next time you come across a picture of a ravishing dish on Instagram or WeChat that whets your appetite but you can't exactly make out what it is made of, don't wrack your brain trying to guess the recipe. An AI system unwrapped earlier this week helps those with culinary curiosity find the right ingredients of an unknown dish and offers step-by-step instructions how to make it just by analyzing a photo they upload online. Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Qatar Computing Research Institute have developed a deep-learning algorithm that can whip out a recipe just by "looking" at a photo of the dish. They fed the neural network one million recipes, along with one million photos of their final outcome, from popular websites like Allrecipes.com and Food.com to create a huge database they dubbed, Recipe1M, accessible through a web portal they called Pic2Recipe. With a single click of a button, the website allows users to upload a photo of the mystery dish and then the system, using machine learning, goes through the massive mounds of data to analyze it. It then predicts a list of possible ingredients along with their relevant recipes, then ranks them based on how certain the AI is they match the image.