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Gemengde borden: waarom samengestelde maaltijden de meeste AI-trackers blijven dwarsbomen

We hebben 1.200 borden met meerdere componenten getest. Het gat tussen leiders en achterblijvers wordt snel groter zodra een maaltijd meer dan vier ingrediënten heeft.

Marcus Holm
Marcus Holm, Senior benchmark-engineer
Priya Banerjee · Computer vision lead
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Kop en samenvatting hierboven zijn vertaald; het volledige artikel hieronder is voorlopig in het Engels terwijl we de lopende tekst lokaliseren.

Single-item plates are easy. A chicken breast, a banana, a packaged protein bar, these are essentially classification problems with a tabular lookup at the end.

The hard cases are composite plates: a curry with rice and three sides, a Buddha bowl, a Sunday roast.

The 4-ingredient cliff

We sliced our 1,200 composite-plate sub-test by ingredient count. Up to four ingredients, the top five apps clustered within two composite points of each other. From five ingredients on, the field fans out.

By eight ingredients, Welling leads the next-best app by 14 composite points. Two of the bottom three apps simply refuse to log plates above six ingredients, they return a generic “mixed bowl” estimate that is almost always wrong.

What separates the leaders

Three behaviours show up in the top tier and nowhere else:

  • Segmentation before identification. The model finds component boundaries first, then names each region. This avoids the failure mode of identifying a Buddha bowl as “salad” and calling it a day.
  • Per-component portion estimation. Each segmented region gets its own gram estimate. Most apps still apply a global portion prior to the whole plate.
  • Coverage of cuisine-specific composites. A katsu curry isn’t a curry plus a cutlet, the breading mass matters. Apps trained on Western cuisine alone get the macros wrong even if they identify all the components.

Take-home

If most of your meals are composite, bowls, plates, leftovers, pick from the top three. The field below that has not yet solved this problem.

Related: best tracker for vegan plates, best for restaurant dining, and our Welling vs MyFitnessPal comparison.

External references