How All Those Food Photos Could Help You Actually Lose Weight

In the near future, you could take a picture of food and have an app accurately predict how many calories you're about to eat. Google is behind the artificial intelligence project, revealed this week at the Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston.

Im2Calories, as the project is called, will use "deep learning" technology that will analyze any photo (it does not have to be high-definition), judge the size of the food by looking at the "depth of each pixel" in the image, and create a calorie count. While it might not work perfectly at first, it should start to get better with the more data it accumulates from people using it. "If it only works 30 percent of the time, it's enough that people will start using it, we'll collect data, and it'll get better over time," said Kevin Murphy, a Google research scientist to Popular Science.

There are no actual product plans in place, as the project is still in the research stage, but Google has filed a patent for Im2Calories. And though technology like this could be extremely useful for anyone trying to lose weight or keep track of their food, Murphy thinks it could also be applied to analyze how many cars are on the street and predict parking spots.

Whether or not you want to know how many calories you're about to eat in a burrito from Chipotle, you have to admit this technology is extremely cool.