Himanshu Vajaria, Engineering Manager at 365 Retail Markets, presents the “Enabling Smart Retail with Visual AI” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
Automated checkout systems are on the rise—preferred by customers and businesses alike. However, most systems rely on the customer scanning one product at a time and identify the product using a barcode. This adds friction to the process. The Stockwell cabinet from 365 Retail Markets eliminates this friction by using visual AI to recognize items from a catalog.
In this talk, Vajaria explains how the system works, the design decisions his company faced, and the operational and technical challenges and opportunities in the “Visual AI for Retail” space. After a brief overview of the business space, he delves into key technical aspects, including choice of camera and illumination, compute at the edge vs. the cloud, the AI inference pipeline and the data-labeling infrastructure for onboarding new products. He concludes with a look at collaboration opportunities in hardware, AI and data management.
See here for a PDF of the slides.
