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: ±1.1% (DAI 2026).

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.