Computer Vision News - November 2016

Many years before becoming the editor of Computer Vision News, I worked for Procter&Gamble, marketing some of the leading soap and shower gels brands: that involved also spending one day per month visiting the largest retail stores to see how my products were doing on the shelf, at what prices they were offered and how they stood against competition. For my category of products, hand notation of all the data literally took one hour at each store! A Greek company called Yodiwo has developed the exact product which I needed then: Yodigram offers real time field reporting, showing exactly which items are exposed on the shelf in store. That enables the sales or marketing person to record shelf space information on the spot and discuss corrective actions with store management: for instance, make sure that all variants of a specific brand are on display, ready to be bought by consumers. That means that if once people like me had to manually sort out which products were missing, now with Yodigram, the only task is to just take a photo. Then the system processes the image for 1,5 minutes, finds any missing product and suggests it be restocked on the shelves. What Yodigram is not built to do is to record pricing data, since the resolution of the pictures does not allow it. The concept of Yodigram is closer to Planogram compliance and shelves restocking. We have asked Petros Vasileiou, VP Technology & Chief Architect at Yodiwo , to tell us what challenges they needed to solve to develop the application. The first challenge they encountered when developing Yodigram was that the packages on the shelf are usually very close together, but the system must still distinguish between all different packages. When you extract the features from the products, the system may easily combine them to detect one only package when it’s actually two or three different packages. Thus, it becomes a problem of segmentation and detection. 66 Computer Vision News Application Yodigram Application Eye-level detection of Health & Beauty Care products on shelf