Caloricam Backend

Caloricam was my MSc IT dissertation project. The goal of this project was to use Reverse Image Search to identify common foods and food products. For example: When you eat at McDonalds, you could take a picture of the Big Yellow M and, theoretically, the app would show you items from McDonalds Menu to select from. You could then pick the item you're eating from the menu and get the nutritional information.

There are 4 endpoints involved:

Endpoint	Path	Description
Upload	POST /CalorieApp-1.0-SNAPSHOT/api/upload	Uploads and indexes a picture. This should be a picture of food.
Link	GET /CalorieApp-1.0-SNAPSHOT/api/link?image_name=X.jpg&food_name=banana	Links an uploaded picture with a food name.
Identify	GET /CalorieApp-1.0-SNAPSHOT/api/identify?image_name=Y.jpg	Does a reverse image search on Y.jpg to find matching uploaded images. Returns the food name of similar images.
Recognize	GET /CalorieApp-1.0-SNAPSHOT/api/recognize?image_name=Y.jpg	Does a reverse image search on Y.jpg to find matching uploaded images. Returns the nutrition info of similar images.

I have cleaned up the project because I wanted to see it work (and show my kids) but there are a lot of limitations and technical problems:

• You could upload a picture of a puppy and claim it's a octopus.
• Not a proper REST API
• No authentication

I won't be spending more time to build a proper application. Just enough to be able to run it as-is when I need to.

Troubleshooting

Database Mutations aren't executing

I've migrated the project to Hibernate but did a rush job of it. You might need to begin and commit a transaction. See ImageDAO for an example.

DAO method throws NullPointerException but none of the variables are null.

The NullPointerException might occur when the JNDI lookup is able to find the datasource but unable to use it to create a connection. This usually means there's something wrong with the database e.g. the database failed to create or the docker container has shut down.

• Investigate the logs of the db container.
• Delete the docker/data directory and restart the docker container make up

How do you add a jar to a local maven repository

This project uses a local maven repository .local-maven-repo to store the LIRe library jar. To add a new jar to this local maven repo, you can use the following command:

mvn deploy:deploy-file -DgroupId=net.semanticmetadata.lire -DartifactId=lire -Dversion=1.0b4 -Durl=file:./local-maven-repo/ -DrepositoryId=local-maven-repo -DupdateReleaseInfo=true -Dfile=/path/to/jar/example/lire.jar

Useful Resources

• LIRe Docuemntation
• LIRe Releases
• Hibernate Tomcat JNDI DataSource Example Tutorial
• Can I inject an JPA EntityManager using CDI and @PersistenceContext, like with Spring?