- Retail & Consumer Goods
Monitoring grocery store shelf inventory with computer vision
Overview
The complexity of grocery product identification
Grocery retailers rely on accurate, real-time product identification to manage shelf inventory, ensure planogram compliance, and reduce stockouts. However, the diversity of packaging, frequent product updates, and variable image capture conditions make automated product recognition extremely challenging at scale.
Our client, a provider of image-based grocery analytics, needed a robust, scalable solution to power its product recognition AI toolkit and enable high-speed identification from both mobile and robotic capture sources.
Our Solution
A computer vision-based product identification pipeline
OneSix designed and implemented a robust computer vision-based product identification pipeline capable of analyzing high-resolution shelf images and delivering product-level insights at scale. The solution featured:
- Custom-trained computer vision models to detect, segment, and classify products in complex retail environments.
- High-speed vector search across tens of millions of product variations to rapidly match images to known SKUs.
- Rich metadata output, including product IDs and associated SKU-level details.
- Scalable production infrastructure, incorporating optimized models, graph-based search, and dynamic supporting databases.
- Comprehensive tooling, enabling internal teams and external customers to deploy product ID endpoints, create and manage product sets, and support new retailer onboarding.
- Advanced classification methods, including open-set and few-shot learning to recognize novel or rare products and identify out-of-set items for refinement.
Results
Faster, smarter grocery store shelf analytics
The end-to-end solution delivered measurable impact for grocery retailers:
- Reduced stockouts through accurate identification of missing or misaligned products.
- Improved planogram compliance via automated shelf verification from various image capture methods.
- Enhanced operational flexibility, enabling rapid enrollment of new products and seamless expansion across retailers.
- Multi-platform capability, with compatibility across mobile phone cameras, panoramic imaging, and robotic platforms.
By integrating computer vision, scalable infrastructure, and intuitive tools, OneSix built a flexible product identification platform that continues to power real-time shelf analytics and support evolving retail needs.
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