There are many applications in retail that benefit from computer vision and scene understanding. The rapid advancements in AI driven systems allows for increasingly sophisticated tasks to be automated and allow human efforts to be focused on making a difference where they do so best. The implementation of AI systems in retail can often benefit from existing infratstructure, as well as newer AI enabled equipment such as smart cameras. Some examples of use cases are listed below.
Ensuring that shelves are fully and correctly stocked is critical for retailers. AI systems can help with this, as they can easily identify the relevant products as well as the correct orientations. Synthetic data is especially usedful, as it can train for unreleased products, strange lighting conditions and corner case occlusions.
The retail market is rapidly evovling, and it is important that up to date guidelines are followed. These include keeping a social distance from other shoppers, ensuring shoppers are wearing protective masks, following one way systems to name but a few. AI can help automate the detection and alerting of these type of requirements.
Reducing loss through theft and wastage is critical for retail environments. Monitoring of customers, staff and stock is essential. Identifying these elements requires advanced computer vision. AI enables accurate detection of all elements, but requires significant training data.
