Fridge cataloging is actually a great use case for image recognition, the problem is fridges no accommodations to power accessories inside them.
I have a couple of temperature sensors to alert Home Assistant if the fridge gets too warm. It would be easy and cheap to add some ESP32-camera modules to track contents...but there's no way to power them nicely (I simply don't know where I could pull USB power through).
Samsung makes an "AI Vision" fridge I looked at briefly, but it didn't come close to making sense for us given the unreliability of the vision system, the cost of replacing a couple fridges, and the comparative simplicity of a paper list.
I have one. It’s the stupidest thing ever. It tries to detect food items going in and out, requires confirmation on screen, and maybe categorises 5% of things automatically.
Very very very flat cables don't mess with the gaskets on the door too much.
You can only track what containers are in the fridge, not how much is left or if it’s expired. “Automated” pantry or fridge tracking is just not possible and requires way more effort than just writing “mustard” on the shopping list when you notice you’re low.
If you had a scale with an image recognition camera and you put everything on the scale before and after removing it from the fridge, it would probably work pretty well? I've been pondering setting something like that up, it would also be really helpful for keeping track of how much and of what I'm actually putting into the food I made, if I weigh everything before and after, I can just collect the amounts after the fact and don't have to worry as much about measuring if I want to make the same dish again.
That would be extremely cool, I would love to follow you on youtube or something if you decide to pursue this.
Again, you still have to put in way more work. You have to somehow know the weight of the container, otherwise it will never register as empty. Or you have to know the volume and the density of its contents (or worse, think about a jar of olives or pickles, how would a weight tell you it’s empty with the brine in there?). You still don’t know the expiry date. There’s no chance of automatically tracking this stuff.
The weight and expiry of the contents is printed on the package. Brine is a problem but olives and pickles it's much more tractable to estimate from a picture. These are all essentially solved image recognition problems. It doesn't need to be perfect to be useful either. The expiration date is the trickiest one, but mostly because you would need cameras on all sides including top and bottom, so you might end up having to hold it up for a moment to make sure the bottom is clearly photographed.
And yes, it's a bit more work but it gives high-fidelity data, with the right software you could calculate your actual nutrient intake with very high fidelity, which would actually be worth an extra 15-30 minutes a day of effort.