Research Article

NutriSnap: Mobile-Based Food Recognition with Caloric and Macronutrient Estimation using MobileNetv2 and YOLOv8n

by  Andrei Carl L. Castro, Nathan Sheary G. Muñoz, Neo Jezer A. Pare, Joey S. Aviles
journal cover
International Journal of Computer Applications
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Volume 187 - Issue 93
Published: March 2026
Authors: Andrei Carl L. Castro, Nathan Sheary G. Muñoz, Neo Jezer A. Pare, Joey S. Aviles
10.5120/ijca2026926609
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Andrei Carl L. Castro, Nathan Sheary G. Muñoz, Neo Jezer A. Pare, Joey S. Aviles . NutriSnap: Mobile-Based Food Recognition with Caloric and Macronutrient Estimation using MobileNetv2 and YOLOv8n. International Journal of Computer Applications. 187, 93 (March 2026), 31-37. DOI=10.5120/ijca2026926609

                        @article{ 10.5120/ijca2026926609,
                        author  = { Andrei Carl L. Castro,Nathan Sheary G. Muñoz,Neo Jezer A. Pare,Joey S. Aviles },
                        title   = { NutriSnap: Mobile-Based Food Recognition with Caloric and Macronutrient Estimation using MobileNetv2 and YOLOv8n },
                        journal = { International Journal of Computer Applications },
                        year    = { 2026 },
                        volume  = { 187 },
                        number  = { 93 },
                        pages   = { 31-37 },
                        doi     = { 10.5120/ijca2026926609 },
                        publisher = { Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA }
                        }
                        %0 Journal Article
                        %D 2026
                        %A Andrei Carl L. Castro
                        %A Nathan Sheary G. Muñoz
                        %A Neo Jezer A. Pare
                        %A Joey S. Aviles
                        %T NutriSnap: Mobile-Based Food Recognition with Caloric and Macronutrient Estimation using MobileNetv2 and YOLOv8n%T 
                        %J International Journal of Computer Applications
                        %V 187
                        %N 93
                        %P 31-37
                        %R 10.5120/ijca2026926609
                        %I Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Abstract

This paper presents NutriSnap, a mobile-based food recognition system that estimates caloric and macronutrient content from user-captured images. The system integrates MobileNetV2 for image classification and YOLOv8n for object detection in a modular two-stage pipeline. Trained on the Food-101, UEC-256, Food2K, and a custom Filipino food dataset (Phil23), the MobileNetV2 model achieved a Top-1 validation accuracy of 73.19% across 189 food categories, with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.73 and a weighted F1 of 0.73. The YOLOv8n model, trained using a three-stage fine-tuning approach with synthetic data augmentation, attained 96.1% precision, 92.9% recall, and 97.3% mAP50 on the validation set. Both models were converted to TensorFlow Lite (TFLite) and integrated into a Flutter-based Android application. Nutritional values are retrieved from the USDA FoodData Central and Philippine Food Composition Tables (PhilFCT) databases using a proportion-based formula keyed to user-entered serving weight. System usability was evaluated using the System Usability Scale (SUS) with 68 participants, yielding a mean score of 80.62, categorized as "Excellent." Comprehensive experimental results, including training convergence curves, per-class performance analysis, stage-wise detection metrics, and comparative evaluation against related works, demonstrate that the integrated pipeline is effective for real-time dietary monitoring on resource-constrained mobile devices.

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Index Terms
Computer Science
Information Sciences
No index terms available.
Keywords

Food Recognition MobileNetV2 YOLOv8n Caloric Estimation Macronutrient Estimation Transfer Learning Mobile Application Deep Learning TensorFlow Lite.

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