Optical Character Recognition Software for Scanning Nutrition Facts Panel

Good nutrition is fundamental to life long health Chronic diseases such as heart disease and stroke and scores of health conditions are related to the food we consume Providing easy to access and up to date nutritional information of both individual products and the food supply as a whole is key to improving our nation s health During Phase I Cellar Door Labs demonstrated a novel mobile app technology that could directly interpret and catalog Nutrition Facts Panels NFP on packaged food products from a photograph By employing advanced image processing optical character recognition OCR and intelligent parsing the system was able to interpret nutrient quantities with a accuracy In Phase II this technology will be extended to operate on a broad range of products interpret ingredient lists directly and automatically recognize food categories NFP ingredient and food category information will be directly captured and store in the cloud through the new mobile app By utilizing crowdsourcing algorithms the incoming data can be validated thereby increasing the overall accuracy of the stored product data A programming interface to the collected data as well as a web based analytics tool will enable researchers to monitor the current food supply