Contour estimation of liquid food using temperature information

In this work, a basic method and its improved method were tested to judge whether the volume of food on a dish can be estimated based on thermal images. The author's research group has been developing a human support robot for elderly's medication management at home. The robot has a RGB-D camera, so it can measure not only the color of objects on a dish but also the distance to them. By using the information, the robot was able to estimate the volume of white objects on a white plate. However, in the case when food spreads thinly on a dish such as soup, the estimated volume is inaccurate by ambiguous boundary. Therefore, the author confirmed how the boundary between food and dishware is represented by temperature information.