Cellar Door Labs — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: ODCDC

Description

Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle Chronic diseases such as heart disease and stroke and scores of health conditions are related to the food we consume Accurate tools that assess nutrient intake can provide valuable insights for preventing chronic diseases Mobile technologies have shown tremendous promise in allowing consumers to manage their health and nutrition Cellar Door Labs proposes NutriSnap a mobile application that interprets the Nutrition Facts Panel NFP from photos of packaged food items NutriSnap employs state of the art image processing and optical character recognition OCR algorithms to extract nutrition information from NFPs on any box bag can or other packaged food items Automated recognition of characters and words is sensitive to image defects NutriSnap s specialized image restoration algorithms preprocess NFP photos by locating text ad converting it to the appropriate scale and orientation to ensure optimal performance The OCR engine extracts serving size calories and nutrient information of the product and stores the information in a publically available database These algorithms and database reside in a cloud computing architecture to ensure availability and performance NutriSnap features an API so app developers and public health officials can access OCR technology and the nutrition database