The Influence of the Food Images on Consumers＇ Attention by Using the Eye-Tracking Technology

This study used an eye-tracking methodology to investigate consumers＇ gazing behavior by focusing on how assessment design influences gazing behavior and decision time. Only one factor of test design was investigated and each test contained three images. Eight participants were recruited. This study answered three questions： （1） Does the color of food influence gazing behavior？ （2） Does the color of food influence decision-making？ （3） Is gazing behavior related to decision-making behavior？ The results demonstrated that gazing behavior and decision time have a positive relationship with the image selected. Future research should consider the relationships between eye movements, cognitive goals, and tasks

Attention Guided Food Recognition via Multi-Stage Local Feature Fusion

The task of food image recognition,a nuanced subset of fine-grained image recognition,grapples with substantial intra-class variation and minimal inter-class differences.These challenges are compounded by the irregular and multi-scale nature of food images.Addressing these complexities,our study introduces an advanced model that leverages multiple attention mechanisms and multi-stage local fusion,grounded in the ConvNeXt architecture.Our model employs hybrid attention(HA)mechanisms to pinpoint critical discriminative regions within images,substantially mitigating the influence of background noise.Furthermore,it introduces a multi-stage local fusion(MSLF)module,fostering long-distance dependencies between feature maps at varying stages.This approach facilitates the assimilation of complementary features across scales,significantly bolstering the model’s capacity for feature extraction.Furthermore,we constructed a dataset named Roushi60,which consists of 60 different categories of common meat dishes.Empirical evaluation of the ETH Food-101,ChineseFoodNet,and Roushi60 datasets reveals that our model achieves recognition accuracies of 91.12%,82.86%,and 92.50%,respectively.These figures not only mark an improvement of 1.04%,3.42%,and 1.36%over the foundational ConvNeXt network but also surpass the performance of most contemporary food image recognition methods.Such advancements underscore the efficacy of our proposed model in navigating the intricate landscape of food image recognition,setting a new benchmark for the field.

Learning to assess visual aesthetics of food images

Distinguishing aesthetically pleasing food photos from others is an important visual analysis task for social media and ranking systems related to food.Nevertheless,aesthetic assessment of food images remains a challenging and relatively unexplored task,largely due to the lack of related food image datasets and practical knowledge.Thus,we present the Gourmet Photography Dataset(GPD),the first largescale dataset for aesthetic assessment of food photos.It contains 24,000 images with corresponding binary aesthetic labels,covering a large variety of foods and scenes.We also provide a non-stationary regularization method to combat over-fitting and enhance the ability of tuned models to generalize.Quantitative results from extensive experiments,including a generalization ability test,verify that neural networks trained on the GPD achieve comparable performance to human experts on the task of aesthetic assessment.We reveal several valuable findings to support further research and applications related to visual aesthetic analysis of food images.To encourage further research,we have made the GPD publicly available at https://github.com/Openning07/GPA.

Tourist Industry Promotion： Aim to Introduce Thai Local Foods Matching With Northern Program＇s Tours to Serve Sustainable Tourism

Tourist industry had been promoted and become one of the important strategies of Thai government for socioeconomic development for years and become successful by ranking--Thailand becomes well-known as top ranking to visit from tourists around the world. When people travel, foods are always needed to fulfill human needs and the satisfaction of the travelers. The objectives of the research were to： （1） survey and determine the local food image and identity of Northern region of Thailand to support tourist industry; （2） survey program＇s tourism in Thailand and study the promotion of local food that had added in the programs＇ tours as tourist destination; （3） find out the possibility of local food and culture for promotion in tourist industry of Northern region in Thailand; （4） develop gastronomy tourism＇s routing. The population were the subject persons who are experts in tourist industry, Northern foods restaurant owner, and program＇s tour. Mixed method was used for data collection and analysis. The result of the research is revealed into four parts： Phase 1： （1） Thai Northern region had been divided into two part： upper Northern and lower Northern region. There are eight provinces in upper Northern region： Chingmai, Chingrai, Lampoon, Lampang, Prayao, Phare, Nan, and Mae-Hongsorn. Chingmai was the capital of ＂Lanna territory （1558-1774）＂ rich with culture; （2） Upper Northern local foods related to the legend, have their own characters and are still available to get to eat; （3） Northern local food contained with Northern ingredient and indicated as geographical indications; （4） The lower Northern region related with ＂Sukhothai territory （1157-1370）＂, Sukhothai was the capital. There are six provinces in the region： Sukhothai, U-taradid, Tag, Kampangpet, Pidsanuloak, and Petchaboon. Food of the lower Northern provinces had their own characteristics but some of the dishes were influenced with Chinese cuisine, such as noodles. Phase 2： Most of tour companies had included local food in the tour programs to promote Northern local foods in low level. Phase 3： Life＇s pathway of the Northern people lived related to the three seasons： rainy season, cool season, and summer. Each season had different kinds of vegetables and fruits which influence the menus and foods. Eating foods as medicine also related to the season, such as shallot and garlic had added more in foods in cool season, in order to prevent cold of family＇s members. Northern life style always celebrated in all ceremonies with foods, snack, and sweet, such as： wedding, cremation, and community cerebrations which may be promoted in tour program as their ways of living with sustainable, in order to promote socioeconomic development in the community. Phase 4： The gastronomy tourism was developed into five routings to promote tourist industry in the Northern part of Thailand as the following： （1） gateway to reach ＂Lanna＂; （2）window to visit the Northern part of Thailand; （3） pay respect to the Buddha and visit dynasty heritage; （4） visit the peaceful and tranquilly heritage; and （5） visit Thailand＇s border with boundless. Conclusion： Thai local lifestyle, culture, and local foods in the Northern part of Thailand, contained rich image and identity of history, legend, and human diversity, which are worth and valuable for promoting as tourist industry in the Northern part of Thailand and also conserved job absorption and community development. Therefore the government of Thailand and tour companies ought to promote Thai local foods as value added and tourist industry which also benefit for the sustainable socioeconomic development in long future.