US Patent 10074028 Real-time diet assessment and food identification using thermal imaging

Systems and methods are described for automatically identifying a food item. A color image and a thermal image are received by an electronic processor with a first food item in the field of view of both the color image and the thermal image. The electronic processor identifies a region of pixels in the color image that corresponds to the first food item based at least in part on a temperature intensity of the pixels in the identified region of pixels relative to other pixels in the thermal image. At least one feature is extracted from the identified region of pixels in the color image corresponding to the first food item and the electronic processor automatically identifies a type of food corresponding to the first food item based at least in part on the at least extracted feature.