Tata Consultancy Services Limited

Avishek Kumar Shaw

Suman Kumar

Shilpa Yadukumar Rao

Dipti Prasad Mukherjee

Pranoy Hari

Rajashree Ramakrishnan

Bikash Santra

Nishant Kumar

Vivek Balaraman

Archan Ray

Siddhartha Sarkar

The fine-grained variations in product images are usually due to slight variations in text, size, and color of the package. Both marginal variations in image content and illumination poses an important challenge in product classification. This disclosure relates to a system and method for fine-grained classification of similar-looking products utilizing object-level and part-level information. The system simultaneously captures an object-level and part-level information of the product. The object-level classification score of the product is estimated with the trained RC-Net, a deep supervised convolutional autoencoder. For annotation-free modelling of part-level information of the product the discriminative part-proposal of the product is identified around the BRISK key points. An ordered sequence of the discriminative part-proposals and the product image, encoded using stacked convolutional LSTM network, estimates the part-level classification score. Finally, the trained RC-Net and stacked conv-LSTM network jointly classifies the product image based on the final classification score.

Fine-grained classification of retail products

This disclosure relates generally to a system and method to identify various products on a plurality of images of various shelves of a retail store to facilitate compliance with respect to planograms. Planogram is a visual plan, which designates the placement of products on shelves and merchandising display fixtures of a retail store. Planograms are used to create consistency between store locations, to provide proper shelf space allocation, to improve visual merchandising appeal, and to create product-pairing suggestions. There are a few assumptions considering one instance per product class is available beforehand and the physical dimension of each product template is available in some suitable unit of length. In case of absence of physical dimension of the products, a context information of the retail store will be used. The context information is that the products of similar shapes or classes are arranged together in the shelves for consumers' convenience.

Method and system for region proposal based object recognition for estimating planogram compliance

Object recognition based estimation of planogram compliance provides an expected arrangement of products in shelves. Identifying whether a product is placed in an appropriate location of a shelf is a challenging task due to various real-time parameters associated with image capturing. In the present disclosure, an input image associated with shelf of a retail store is received and a product images are cropped. Further, a set of reference images stored in a database are scaled corresponding to the input image. Further, one or more composite matching scores are calculated based on normalized cross-correlation and shape based feature matching to obtain one or more probable product images associated with a location. Further, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is constructed based on the one or more composite scores and the one or more probable products. Finally, an optimal matching product image for a particular location is obtained from the DAG.

System and method for object recognition based estimation of planogram compliance

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Kolkata, India

Avishek Kumar Shaw