During my weakly meeting with Igor, he brought to my attention a better way to increment the ranking algorithm. In the first round, a certain number of image processing techniques will be applied to the original image and the top 10 or so images will be passed on to the next round. For each round after, permutations of the image processing techniques will be applied to the images, and the next 10 winners will be promoted to the next round. This way, we can keep applying several techniques on the images, and find the best combination. The process would go on until either the machine has a confidence interval beyond a certain threshold, or a certain number of rounds have passed. The latter is important so the machine does not keep going for ever (or for too long) if the image is simply to bad be made decent. This brings me to the question of what to do if no food is found in the image. Should it return an error, or maybe apply the process to the image and see how it turns out? It is possible that the user submitted an image that contains an unusually morphed food, which the AI might not recognize as food, but still be able to make look good.

I also have heard about genetic algorithms, and will look into those as a safety net/supplement.