This app lets you turn food photos into recipes

A new app will allow you to turn any food photo into a recipe you can actually use.

Deciding what to cook for dinner has just got a whole lot easier, thanks to a new app that allows you to turn food photos into simple recipes and ingredients lists. 

The new app, Pic2Recipe!, which was created by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trained to recognise the ingredients in a photo and match them with recipes stored in the Pic2Recipe database. So far, the database contains around one million recipes from multiple food websites.  

If this invention paves way to a digital movement, soon you could be able to scroll Instagram, search for a dish you like and find a recipe to match at the click of a button. 

So far, the website has a 65% success rate and is best at recognising desserts. More complex foods, such as sushi and smoothies, still require much more data for the ingredients to become easily recognisable. 

There have been a number of attempts in the past to turn photos into recipes, but they were limited to smaller datasets. With the unprecedented number of recipes already stored in the Pic2Recipe! database, the scope for success is already deemed much higher. 

According to Press Association, the team behind the project said with further development, the system “could be gainfully applied to other ‘recipes’ like assembly instructions, tutorials and industrial processes”. 

“We hope that our contributions will support the creation of automated tools for food and recipe understanding and open doors for many less explored aspects of learning such as compositional creativity and predicting visual outcomes of action sequences,” they added.

Think it sounds too good to be true? You can watch a video to see how it works here.