Supermarket Product Detection and Recognition: Utilizing Deep Learning with Rectified Imagery

Abstract

Product Identification has sprung up to become one of the most challenging problems in the automation of the retail industry. With the new industry 5.0 standards, automated inventory management, and catalog creation tasks are vitally important. Object identification models have emerged as a viable answer with their unprecedented identification and localization accuracy. However, the close-knit rack design of supermarkets generates the problem of angle variation in capturing images. The angle-variant densely packed images(a single image contains many objects) become overwhelming for these models alone. In this paper, we try to supplement object detection models with traditional Hough transform (HT) and homogeneous estimation concepts. We study the effect of rectified images using homography estimation and hough transform and their limitations on the problem of grocery identification. We make a case for creating a new dataset to test the effects of such rectification and produce analytical results on different scenarios of angle variation and object densities per image. Extensive experiments on different object detection models suggest that image rectification of angled images improves the detection accuracy of grocery products in images. The results also highlight the limitation of rectification on the angle of image capture and the object density of the image.