Prediction of Mental State from Food Images

Abstract

Diet is a very important factor in people's health management. Applications that record photos of meals and help people manage their diets are used by many users every day. In many cases, such applications use images just to estimate meals and calories. We propose a further use of diet images. The new idea is to read changes in mental health, such as stress and well-being, from the diet image over some period of time. If the applications can recognize the signs of mental health changes that dietary records give, they will be more useful as health management applications. The two contributions of this paper are that we have created a dataset consisting of 24,644 meal items dietary record and mental health records for the same time period(over a 3-month period), and that we have shown that changes in mental health are correlated with changes in diet, and especially, the correlation is stronger in groups with greater change. The potential and goal of this study are to extract features from the images of meals related to mental health.