Laser Cooking: a Novel Culinary Technique for DryHeating using a Laser Cutter and Vision Technology

Kentaro FukuchiMeiji University

1-1-1 Higashimita Tama-kuKawasaki-shi Kanagawa,

JAPANkentaro@fukuchi.org

Kazuhiro JoInstitute of Advanced Media

Arts and SciencesRyoke-cho 3-95, Ogaki-shi

Gifu, JAPANjo@jp.org

Akifumi TomiyamaMeiji University

Shunsuke TakaoTokyo University of the Arts

ABSTRACTWe propose a novel cooking technology that uses a lasercutter as a dry-heating device. In general, dry-heat cookingheats the whole surface of an ingredient, while a laser cut-ter heats a small spot of the surface in a very short time.Our approach employs a computer-controlled laser cutterand a video image-processing technique to cook ingredientsaccording to their shape and composition, allowing for newtastes, textures, decorations, and engraving unique identi-fiers to the ingredients. We introduce some examples of lasercooking. In addition, we propose a multi-layered 3D printingtechnique using powdered sugar to create edible sculpture.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.4 [Information Systems Applications]: Miscellaneous;I.4.9 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Appli-cations

KeywordsCulinary technology, personal fabrication

1. INTRODUCTIONModern culinary techniques employ advanced science and

technology to achieve a novel taste. Vacuum cooking (or“sous-vide”) enables quick but more tasteful food prepara-tion, while low-temperature cooking was developed to bal-ance freshness with cooking safety. Molecular Gastronomy[11]introduced findings from the field of chemistry to cooking,and these technologies have been used not only in the massproduction of processed foods but also by gourmet restau-rants such as “elBulli”[2].Our approach to modern cooking makes use of information

technology and mechatronics. In this paper, we introduce a

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Figure 1: The proposed system, consisting of a lasercutter, a video camera, and a computer.

novel technique of dry heating using a laser, which we call“laser cooking”. In general, dry heating only allows uniformheating of all the ingredients, while our “laser cooker” allowslocal heating of a spot of the ingredients in a very shorttime. It is not intended to replace existing heating meth-ods; rather, the proposed technique is designed to explorenew tastes and eating experiences. We also introduce anintegrated system using the proposed technique with videoimage processing that provides an interface to improve theease of use of the laser-cooking technique. We present someexamples of laser cooking using the proposed system: choco-late baking, healthy precooking of bacon, and 2D fiducialmarker printing. In addition, we propose a multi-layered3D printing technique using powdered sugar to create edi-ble sculptures.

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2. BACKGROUND

2.1 Science and gastronomyHistorically, gastronomic studies have been devoted to the

improvement of cooking technology through the applicationof new methods. For example, the discovery of fire led to thedevelopment of techniques such as grilling, baking, boiling,and frying. Drying, fermentation, chilling and freezing havefacilitated the long-term storage of ingredients, and now, wecan conveniently purchase most seasonal foods throughoutthe year. The development of dishes and cutlery has madeit easier for us to eat hot foods. Automated tools such asjuicers or microwaves have eased the burden of cooking andimproved the quality and speed of home-cooked foods[10].The growth of science and technology affects the devel-

opment of culinary methods. Various modern technologiessuch as microwave and induction heating have been appliedto cooking, and nowadays, they are widely used, even inhome kitchens. Moreover, advanced science and technol-ogy is used for entirely new cooking methods. This processhas been accelerated as a result of collaboration betweenscientists and cooks. Emerging research such as that caon-tained in Molecular Gastronomy, a chemical-based approachto culinary research detailed by Kurti and This[11], intro-duced scientific analysis to cooking. Nowadays, various “ex-otic” technologies are used in the kitchen, including vacuumcooking[6], ironing gradients, and chilling with liquid nitro-gen[3].As a natural consequence, the application of Information

Technology (IT) to culinary research has been considered.Siio and et al. proposed the “Kitchen of the Future”[9], acomputer-augmented kitchen environment to assist novicesby recording/replaying various aspects of the cooking pro-cess. Hashimoto et al. introduced robots to enable an auto-mated tray service[5]. However, these are based on existingcooking processes and are focused on assisting the repro-duction of existing recipes. Our goal is to introduce IT tothe kitchen to create a new kind of taste and experience ofcooking.

2.2 Dry-heating (grilling)Using fire to heat ingredients has contributed to the devel-

opment of new cooking methods[13]. It makes ingredientssafe, edible, crispy, savory and tasty. Heating tools haveevolved from a naked flame to devices such as ovens, gascookers, microwaves, and IH cookers. The development oftools also led to the develoment of various cooking tech-niques such as boiling, frying, and grilling with a pot, pan,etc.However, standard heating tools heat ingredients evenly,

making it difficult to heat them partially. In such cases, adressing process is needed to protect a part of the ingre-dients. For example, “salt masking” (“kesho-jio”) is usedto prevent fish fins from charring by covering them withsalt[12]. Similarly, for microwaves, aluminum foil can beused.

2.3 Personal fabricationPersonal fabrication is an emerging technology: various

automated machine tools can now be purchased at a lowprice, and individuals can easily use these tools for manufac-turing[4]. Automated tools decrease the number of tedioustasks (e.g. cutting, curving, sculpting), and they improve

the quality of their products to a degree that is comparableto commercial mass produced goods. In this paper, we pro-pose the idea of “personal cooking-fab”, which is inspired bythe personal fabrication movement and which helps usersto make novel, high-quality and food products, and intro-duce the technique of “laser-cooking”, where a laser cutter isused for dry-heat cooking. Personal cooking-fab introducesadvanced automated machine tools to cook ingredients inorder to help individuals to cook many ingredients and im-prove the quality of their food, and find new tastes andtextures in D.I.Y. style.

2.4 Laser cuttersAutomated machine tools have become inexpensive, and

throughout the world, many in D.I.Y. community have es-tablished “fab-labs”. Such tools enable individuals to makehigh-quality goods by themselves. In addition to improvingthe quality, they can now customize their products with thehelp of computers and tools. The tools also enable mass pro-duction by individuals, opening up a new market, as seen in“Maker faire”1.

A laser cutter is an automated cutting machine that uses alaser. It can cut materials rapidly and automatically, and itis becoming popular in the personal fabrication scene, alongwith 3D printers. It can be used not only for cutting butalso for sculpting a wider area by scanning the surface ofthe material. The laser is controlled in two-axes motion likean X-Y plotter, so that it heats a very narrow spot on thesurface to cut or sculpt. Laser cutters are usually used tocut or engrave material for modeling and decoration, butthey can be used to heat virtually anything.

3. LASER COOKINGLaser cooking uses a laser cutter as a “laser cooker” to dry

heat ingredients: it scans the surface of the ingredient witha high-powered laser that heats the ingredients according toa specified pattern. The system controls the power of thelaser and the speed of the scanning, enabling various heatingtechniques such as low power and long term heating, or highpower and instant heating. By using video image processing,the system creates a heat pattern according to the shape,position and structure of the ingredient.

3.1 System overviewFigure 1 shows the proposed system. The system consists

of a laser cutter (Epilog Mini 24), a video camera (LogitechHD Pro Webcam C910), and a computer. The camera is setabove the laser cutter and captures images of ingredients onthe stage of the laser cutter.

3.2 Image processingAt the time of installation of the cooker, the camera is

calibrated manually to capture the whole image of the stage.During the calibration, it is required to point to four cornersof the stage manually for perspective correction.

During cooking, ingredients are placed on a sheet of pa-per to protect them from contamination from the stage andto provide a mono-colored background to simplify the im-age processing. Initially, the user gives a cue to take animage of the ingredients. The lid of the laser cutter shouldbe removed to get a clear image at this time. The system

1http://makerfaire.com/

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Figure 2: Top: image for the camera. Bottom: heat-map image generated from the camera image.

then corrects the perspective of the image and processes it.We have implemented three processing methods that are de-signed for different recipes, as described below.

3.3 Heating styles and image processing

3.3.1 Heat maps from the structure of the ingredientsThe laser cutter we employed has an “engraving mode”

that enables the engraving of an image by giving a grayscaleimage to the cutter. The cutter changes the power of thelaser according to the image. The proposed method in thissection uses this mode to heat an ingredient according to itsstructure.Figure2 shows an example of “melt-fat raw bacon”. The

taste of raw bacon is good but the raw and cold fat is some-times unacceptable for its texture and taste. Laser cookingintroduces a new method to precook raw bacon by heatingonly the fat part of the bacon. The image analysis processcreates a heat map from the camera image by detecting thefat part of the bacon (figure 2). The system detects theshape of the bacon, and filters out small regions as noise,then creates a grayscale image by using the hue and thebrightness values of the image. The right of figure 2 showsthe generated heat map: dark pixels represent areas to beheated with higher power, and light pixels represent areasthat are to be kept raw. The heat pattern is then sent tothe laser cutter and the cutter cooks the bacon in raster-engraving mode using the map. Figure 3 shows the result.Now the well-cooked fat and the fresh taste of the meat canbe experienced at the same time.The current implementation requires manual adjustment

of the contrast and the level of the laser power because itdepends on the power of the environment light. The systemprovides a GUI for the adjustment.

Figure 3: Slice of melt-fat raw bacon, with a magni-fied image.

Figure 4: Printing letters on cheese and chocolatepieces.

3.3.2 Engraving letters and patternsThe engraving mode was originally used to engrave pat-

terns or letters on a surface. However, it requires a patternfor the individual material’s shape, and it also requires thematerial’s position to be adjusted on the stage of the cut-ter. Our system, by contrast, enables automated engravingusing vision recognition techniques. When a bitmap imagefor engraving is given, the system automatically adjusts theposition and the size of the pattern in order to fit it to theingredient. Then it generates an integrated heat map imageto engrave the given pattern. Figure 4 shows an exampleresult.

3.3.3 3D sculptureWe introduce a 3D sculpting method using a 2D-based

laser cutter utilizing the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) tech-nique[8]. To employ SLM, we used the cutting mode of thelaser cutter.

First, the given 3D model is deconstructed as a set of mul-tiple layer. The result consists of these layers, which placesa restriction on the type of structure suitable for modeling.

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Figure 5: Example of a 3D sculpture made frompowdered sugar.

Figure 6: Instruction image printed on rice paper,indicating how to roll a raw spring roll.

Then, each layer is sent to the cutter, which generates alayer from powdered sugar. Figure 5 shows an example. Asimilar technique has been introduced by Evil Mad ScientistLaboratories[1], but we used a laser cutter instead of a heatgun, which enables faster printing.

4. SAMPLESFigure 6 shows an example using the laser cutter’s pattern-

engraving mode to print instructions on how to make a rawspring roll onto rice paper.The next example shows how to integrate Virtual Real-

ity/Augmented Reality technology with gastronomy. Figure7 shows a cracker with a 2D fiducial marker embedded in itssurface. By using this marker, a VR/AR system can over-lay computer graphics onto the cracker. Embedding fiducialmarkers with a laser cutter extends Narumi et al.’s meta-Cookie[7] by adding digital information to ingredients in or-der to show visuals that can depict, for example, detailsabout the ingredients’ composition.

5. CONCLUSIONWe proposed a novel cooking technology called laser cook-

ing that uses a laser cutter as a dry-heating device. The com-bination of personal-fab style with image processing enabled

Figure 7: 2D fiducial markers printed on a crackerand a piece of white bread.

advanced automated cooking and created new possibilitiesof taste and texture. We introduced some experimental re-sults of laser cooking, though the present implementation ofthe laser cooker is a work in progress and we are currentlyat the trial-and-error stage of laser cooking.

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[4] Gershenfeld, N. Fab: The Coming Revolution onYour Desktop – from Personal Computers to PersonalFabrication. Basic Books, 2005.

[5] Hashimoto, S., Ostanin, A., Inami, M., andIgarashi, T. Photograph-based interaction forteaching object delivery tasks to robots. In Proceedingof the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference onHuman-robot interaction (New York, NY, USA, 2010),ACM, pp. 153–154.

[6] Hesser, A. Under pressure. The New York TimesMagazine 2005-08-14 (Aug. 2005).

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[8] Santos, E. C., Shiomi, M., Osakada, K., andLaoui, T. Rapid manufacturing of metal componentsby laser forming. International Journal of MachineTools and Manufacture 46 (2006), 1459–1468.

[9] Siio, I., Hamada, R., and Mima, N. Kitchen of thefuture and applications. In Proceedings of HCII 2007(2007), J. A. Jacko, Ed., Springer Berlin / Heidelberg,pp. 946–955.

[10] Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Univ.of Illinois Press, 2004.

[11] This, H. Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring theScience of Flavor. Arts and Traditions of the Table:Perspectives on Culinary History. Columbia Univ.Press, 2005. Translated by M.B. Debevoise.

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