CookingDiffusion: Cooking Procedural Image Generation with Stable Diffusion

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation models have excelled in creating diverse and realistic images. This success extends to food imagery, where various conditional inputs like cooking styles, ingredients, and recipes are utilized. However, a yet-unexplored challenge is generating a sequence of procedural images based on cooking steps from a recipe. This could enhance the cooking experience with visual guidance and possibly lead to an intelligent cooking simulation system. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel task called cooking procedural image generation . This task is inherently demanding, as it strives to create photo-realistic images that align with cooking steps while preserving sequential consistency. To collectively tackle these challenges, we present CookingDiffusion , a novel approach that leverages Stable Diffusion and three innovative Memory Nets to model procedural prompts. These prompts encompass text prompts (representing cooking steps), image prompts (corresponding to cooking images), and multi-modal prompts (mixing cooking steps and images), ensuring the consistent generation of cooking procedural images. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we pre-process the YouCookII dataset, establishing a new benchmark. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model excels at generating high-quality cooking procedural images with remarkable consistency across sequential cooking steps, as measured by both the FID and the proposed Average Procedure Consistency metrics. Furthermore, CookingDiffusion demonstrates the ability to manipulate ingredients and cooking methods in a recipe. We will make our code, models, and dataset publicly accessible.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications
Published
2025-10-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3771995
Primary Topic
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

CookingDiffusion: Cooking Procedural Image Generation with Stable Diffusion

Chong‐Wah Ngo, Yi Tan, Yanbin Hao, Xiang Wang et al.
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
article

CookingDiffusion: Cooking Procedural Image Generation with Stable Diffusion

Chong‐Wah Ngo, Yi Tan, Yanbin Hao, Xiang Wang, Yuan Wang
article en

Abstract

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation models have excelled in creating diverse and realistic images. This success extends to food imagery, where various conditional inputs like cooking styles, ingredients, and recipes are utilized. However, a yet-unexplored challenge is generating a sequence of procedural images based on cooking steps from a recipe. This could enhance the cooking experience with visual guidance and possibly lead to an intelligent cooking simulation system. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel task called cooking procedural image generation . This task is inherently demanding, as it strives to create photo-realistic images that align with cooking steps while preserving sequential consistency. To collectively tackle these challenges, we present CookingDiffusion , a novel approach that leverages Stable Diffusion and three innovative Memory Nets to model procedural prompts. These prompts encompass text prompts (representing cooking steps), image prompts (corresponding to cooking images), and multi-modal prompts (mixing cooking steps and images), ensuring the consistent generation of cooking procedural images. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we pre-process the YouCookII dataset, establishing a new benchmark. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model excels at generating high-quality cooking procedural images with remarkable consistency across sequential cooking steps, as measured by both the FID and the proposed Average Procedure Consistency metrics. Furthermore, CookingDiffusion demonstrates the ability to manipulate ingredients and cooking methods in a recipe. We will make our code, models, and dataset publicly accessible.

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and ApplicationsVol. 22(1)
University of Science and Technology of China (CN), Hefei University of Technology (CN), Singapore Management University (SG)
Openalex Percentile: Top 71%
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.