A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Multi-source Food Names Mapping Using OpenAI vision, Manual Dictionary and Fuzzy Matching Techniques; 
Authors: Bhetuwal, Shyam; Koivunen, Lauri; Khalil, Rehan; Koskimäki, Sanna; Lähde, Hanna; Houttu, Veera; Laitinen, Kirsi; Mäkilä, Tuomas
Editors: Ahram, Tareq Z.; Kalra, Jay; Karwowski, Waldemar
Conference name: International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics
Publication year: 2026
Journal: AHFE International
Book title : Artificial Intelligence and Social Computing : Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics and the Affiliated Conferences, Istanbul, Turkey, 20-24 July 2026
Volume: 203
First page : 41
Last page: 50
ISBN: 978-1-964867-79-3
ISSN: 2771-0718
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1007316
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Open Access publication channel
Web address : http://dx.doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1007316
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/533885175
Self-archived copy's licence: CC BY NC ND
Self-archived copy's version: Publisher`s PDF
Accurate harmonization of food names across heterogeneous and multilingual datasets remains a major challenge in food informatics, dietary assessment systems, and data-driven public health research. Modern AI-based food recognition models such as LogMeal, FoodSAM, and OpenAI Vision can identify multiple components within complex dishes, but they frequently produce inconsistent, culturally specific, and multilingual labels. These inconsistencies complicate downstream tasks including nutritional analysis and cross-dataset integration. In this study, we evaluated practical methods for mapping AI-generated food component names to Finnish menu-based ground truth in a real-world restaurant setting. We collected 320 meal images using an integrated camera–scale system; 167 images containing multi-component dishes were selected for detailed evaluation against Finnish lunch-line menu labels. We compared (i) a segment-aware, menu-constrained mapping approach that uses LogMeal segmentations and prompts OpenAI Vision to select the best-matching item from the daily menu for each segment, and (ii) a hybrid manually curated canonical dictionary and fuzzy string matching pipeline applied separately to labels from different AI sources. Mapping performance is measured using precision, recall, and F1-score. The segment-aware OpenAI Vision approach achieved the best overall results (Precision = 0.90, Recall = 0.70, F1 = 0.79), while the hybrid dictionary+fuzzy method also improved consistency over direct label matching. These results indicate that menu-aware segment-level reasoning and lightweight lexical normalization are effective for food-name harmonization and can support scalable dietary monitoring and menu analytics.
Keywords:
data integration, Food Name Mapping, Food Name Standardization, fuzzy matching, String Similarity
Downloadable publication This is an electronic reprint of the original article. |
Funding information in the publication:
This research was supported by Business Finland (2022/31/2023). We gratefully acknowledge the Flavoria® multidisciplinary research platform and our colleagues at the Nutrition and Food Research Center of the University of Turku for their continued support.