A Study on How Food Colour May Determine the Categorization of a Dish: Predicting Meal Appeal from Colour Combinations

Abstract

A person’s preference to select or reject certain meals is influenced by several aspects, including colour. In this paper, we study the relevance of food colour for such preferences. To this end, a set of images of meals is processed by an automatic method that associates mood adjectives that capture such meal preferences. These adjectives are obtained by analyzing the colour palettes in the image, using a method based in Kobayashi’s model of harmonic colour combinations. The paper also validates that the colour palettes calculated for each image are harmonic by developing a rating model to predict how much a user would like the colour palettes obtained. This rating is computed using a regression model based on the COLOURlovers dataset implemented to learn users’ preferences. Finally, the adjectives associated automatically with images of dishes are validated by a survey which was responded by 178 people and demonstrates that the labels are adequate. The results obtained in this paper have applications in tourism marketing, to help in the design of marketing multimedia material, especially for promoting restaurants and gastronomic destinations.