Photo AI

feature

Photo AI in a calorie counter has three components:

1. Identification: what foods are in the image?
2. Segmentation: where on the plate is each item?
3. Portion estimation: how much of each in grams/kcal?

Most apps do (1) reasonably. Few do (2). Almost none do (3) reliably without a reference object.

PlateLens does all three with reference-object scaling (utensil, plate edge) for portion. Photo MAPE: ±0.9% (DAI-VAL-2026-01).

MyFitnessPal Premium and Lose It! Premium have photo features that do (1) only. They ask the user to confirm portion manually, which defeats most of the speed gain.

Related: mape, validation-study.