Development of a Hybrid Method for Multi-Stage End-to-End Recognition of Grocery Products in Shelf Images

Abstract

Product recognition on grocery shelf images is a compelling task of object detection because of the similarity between products, the presence of the different scale of product sizes, and the high number of classes, in addition to constantly renewed packaging and added new products’ difficulty in data collection. The use of conventional methods alone is not enough to solve a number of retail problems such as planogram compliance, stock tracking on shelves, and customer support. The purpose of this study is to achieve significant results using the suggested multi-stage end-to-end process, including product detection, product classification, and refinement. The comparison of different methods is provided by a traditional computer vision approach, Aggregate Channel Features (ACF) and Single-Shot Detectors (SSD) are used in the product detection stage, and Speed-up Robust Features (SURF), Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Key points (BRISK), Oriented Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST), Rotated Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features (BRIEF) (ORB), and hybrids of these methods are used in the product classification stage. The experimental results used the entire Grocery Products dataset and its different subsets with a different number of products and images. The best performance was achieved with the use of SSD in the product detection stage and the hybrid use of SURF, BRISK, and ORB in the product classification stage, respectively. Additionally, the proposed approach performed comparably or better than existing models.