Novel Multicolumn Kernel Extreme Learning Machine for Food Detection via Optimal Features from CNN

Automatic food detection is an emerging topic of interest due to its wide array of applications ranging from detecting food images on social media platforms to filtering non-food photos from the users in dietary assessment apps. Recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has facilitated enforcing an eating ban by automatically detecting eating activities from cameras in public places. Therefore, to tackle the challenge of recognizing food images with high accuracy, we proposed the idea of a hybrid framework for extracting and selecting optimal features from an efficient neural network. There on, a nonlinear classifier is employed to discriminate between linearly inseparable feature vectors with great precision. In line with this idea, our method extracts features from MobileNetV3, selects an optimal subset of attributes by using Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values, and exploits kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) due to its nonlinear decision boundary and good generalization ability. However, KELM suffers from the 'curse of dimensionality problem' for large datasets due to the complex computation of kernel matrix with large numbers of hidden nodes. We solved this problem by proposing a novel multicolumn kernel extreme learning machine (MCKELM) which exploited the k-d tree algorithm to divide data into N subsets and trains separate KELM on each subset of data. Then, the method incorporates KELM classifiers into parallel structures and selects the top k nearest subsets during testing by using the k-d tree search for classifying input instead of the whole network. For evaluating a proposed framework large food/non-food dataset is prepared using nine publically available datasets. Experimental results showed the superiority of our method on an integrated set of measures while solving the problem of 'curse of dimensionality in KELM for large datasets.