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Comment by cenamus | Hacker News Reader

Calorie counting as never gonna be accurate, just how would you know what's hiding inside a stew or curry? How much oil or meat? How much dressing is on the salad? There's a reason people do caloriy counting with raw ingredients (or pre bought stuff) and not by wheighing and measuring plates of food

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The only reason one might care about an accurate calorie counter is for longevity. But the vast majority of people who count calories are doing it for weight control. They don't need an accurate calorie count.

All you need to know is whether your weight is trending how you want it to trend and, if not, adjust calories appropriately. I feel like a clever enough model could take pictures of food, your heart rate and your daily weigh in and suggest ways to achieve your weight goal, like "have less fries" etc.

I know that (and I'm not building a calorie counter). The question is about whether 4o can read photos better with depth maps or derived measurements provided alongside the original image and the example was chosen as it's inaccurate but could perhaps be improved with depth map data (even if not to the point of "accurate")

The answer to that question is "probably not".

First: the image recognition model is unlikely to have seen very many depth maps. Seeing one alongside a photo probably won't help it recognize the image any better.

Second: even if the model knew what to do with a depth map, there's no reason to suspect that it'd help in this application. The lack of accuracy in a image-to-calorie-count app doesn't come from problems which a depth map can answer like "is this plate sitting on the table or raised above it"; they come from problems which can't be answered visually like "is this a glass of whole milk or non-fat" or "are these vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter".

Depth map can be used to measure dimensions of objects, not only relative positions

It's probably accurate enough for most people most of the time.

The labels on your food are +/-20%. If you are analyzing all of your meals via camera, it's probably not too far off that over a week.

I find that hard to believe, those calorie measurements are pretty good.

And 20% per week is the difference between maintaining your wheight and gaining 1.6kg of pure fat a month. (Or losing that much)

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