Greg Diamond

Paulina Bugembe

ECE 533

Food Marketing and Image Enhancement

Problem:

In marketing food products, what sells?

Naturally, health content and style of food have a lot to do with how we choose what to eat. However, it all boils down to what “looks” tasty. So, how do we control what looks tasty to the human eye? Utilizing various image enhancement techniques such as filters, histogram processing, contrast stretching, and color modeling to images of food, we would like to investigate which enhancement techniques would be the best to use in food marketing through images.

Proposed Approach:

We will apply several image enhancement techniques to single image of food to achieve a desired appealing effect. We will then collect these enhancement techniques in a sort of software package.

After looking at various food photography websites and doing research on the internet, we noticed that bright colors, i.e. vivid colors and high contrast, we narrowed down a few techniques that we thought would be add to the appearance of images of food.

These techniques include:

  • Hue/Saturation adjustment: to enhance washed out images of food
  • Adjustment of color: Varying the levels of red, green, and blue can provide for a pleasing effect for foods that are of the three primary colors.
  • HighPass Filtering: For sharpening of edges in the images of food to provide a “clearer” picture.
  • Contrast stretching: In any sort of image processing, changing the contrast level seems to be pleasing to peoples’ eyes.

We have a variety of images of varying qualities that we would like to apply these techniques on. After applying various techniques, different combinations of techniques, we will try to decipher what would be some of the best techniques to use on certain foods. Just as certain techniques work best to enhance certain image characteristics, we believe that we can find certain techniques that work best to enhance the images of foods with certain textures and colors.

We will survey a group of people using the enhanced images to determine which enhancement technique achieved the desired effect. We will run this experiment using several different images of different types of food to compare and contrast which techniques work better for making different types of food appealing to consumers. Our goal is to provide a foundation for a food marketing or advertising company to use to enhance any images of food they display to their customers.