Find recipes by adding smartness to a surface: Vegetable Recognizer

What to cook when you do not have the right ingredients to cook the dishes you know? To aid you in such circumstances many websites and applications used to ask you to input the ingredients you have and they retrieve recipes that match the ingredients and your taste. But the common feedback to such useful applications was that it is cumbersome to type all that you have.

To overcome this, yet another miracle of image recognition ability of computers is put to good use. Previously, few people came up with the solution of recognizing objects with their chemical composition.

At TEDxBrainport during the Dutch Technology Week in Eindhoven, a Netherland based Studio diip has flaunted a device that can recognize vegetables using image processing techniques.

Using the data from the vegetables so detected, it provides recipes that include those items. In this, a projection screen is used which can be placed on a surface which instantly turns into a smart surface. This technology does not require any sophisticated video/ image capturing device, even a standard web-camera is sufficient. This camera located overhead can scan the ingredients placed on this surface.

Check out this video for the illustration:

When you place ingredients on the smart surface, it automatically captures what it is and uses image recognition methods and searching methods to find pre-programmed ingredients to match this. Hence, it successfully displays the name of the object right next to it. It supports multiple ingredient detection in parallel. Now, with the available ingredients, it again scans a database of recipes and returns ones that best match the requirements.

Isn’t it so cool? I would buy a system like this had it not involves screens, projectors, surfaces and cameras. Perhaps something analogous to this invention would crop up that uses only a smart-phone. In which case, I’d be the first to use it!