Split-Check: Boosting Product Recognition via Instance-Level Retrieval

AI-based methods are shining across a variety of industries, especially unmanned retail. Product recognition is the problem of recognizing the category and quantity of products (e.g., beverages and mineral water) in intelligent unmanned vending machines (UVMs) to automatic checkout during purchase. However, for similar products in hundreds of categories, the existing method is not accurate enough. Besides, they cannot be extended for new products without retraining. In this article, we propose a product recognition approach based on intelligent UVMs, called Split-Check, which first splits the region of interest of products by detection and then check product by instance-level retrieval. Split-Check is the combination of two important components. The preliminary detection distinguishes items that contain the different coarse-grained features, then locates items, and classifies them into coarse-grained categories as a candidate. The retrieval further distinguishes the candidate items that contain the different fine-grained features. Besides, we reconstruct a large-scale categories product dataset GOODS-85 based on actual UVMs scenarios, in which the number of categories of items is larger than the existing dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our method significantly improves the recognition performance of hundreds of products and increases the scalability of products.