A system to support the amateurs to take a delicious-looking picture of foods

Recently, many people take a picture of foods at home or in restaurants, and upload the picture to a social networking service (SNS) to share it with friends. People want to take a delicious-looking picture of foods, but it is often difficult, because most of them have no idea how to take a delicious-looking picture. There are many photography techniques for composition[Liu et al. 2010], lighting, color, focus, etc, and the techniques used to take a picture are different for different types of subjects. The problem lies in the difficulty for amateur photographers to choose and apply appropriate ones from such many techniques.

In this paper, we pay attention to composition and develop a system to support the amateurs to take a delicious-looking picture of foods in a short time. Our target users are the amateurs of food photography and our target photographic subjects are foods on dishes. There are four steps to take a picture using our system: 1) our system automatically recognizes foods on dishes; 2) our system suggests the composition and the camera tilt, by which the user can take a delicious-looking picture; 3) the user arranges foods and dishes on the table, and set the camera position and tilt; 4) finally, the user takes the picture.