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Computer Vision goes shopping on AI2Future

Josipa Jurić

On October 13 and 14, 2022, the AI2FUTURE conference, the most important event of the year for the AI industry in Croatia, will be held in Zagreb. The conference organized by CroAI Croatian AI Association brings new strategies, ideas, trends and brings together those who build innovative projects based on AI technology.

Our Robert Jambrečić, Machine Learning Engineer, is participating as a lecturer this year. Robert will introduce you to how computer vision goes shopping and present the system for visual recognition of products on the shelves, which we are developing in cooperation with experts from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing from Zagreb.

The project’s primary goal could roughly be placed in Retail Store Item Detection, but we are also targeting some additional information related to the products. The additional information should enable automated inspection of product placement, and price checking, but these tasks open a variety of specific technical problems. Fortunately, the essential tool to solve those problems is the same as for store item detection, so we detect them all: shelves, empty spaces, price tags, numerals of the prices, etc. Additional information on the product is also gathered by extending the product detection to detect important product parts, estimate product orientation, and category.

Unsurprisingly, deep neural networks have proven to be the right tool for all tasks, but some very specific modifications to the popular architectures are necessary. Combining many years of experience in the industry and innovative approaches, Megatrend and Ph.D. students at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing created the perfect team to tackle these problems.

Robert is a machine learning engineer at Cloudonia, part of Megatrend group, where he is in charge of integrating and deploying ML models into production. Through college and previous projects, he mastered various fields, starting as a backend developer, then ventured into the world of machine learning, and finally learned the basics of DevOps and putting projects into production. Working on this project enabled him to consolidate all the acquired knowledge and to work on completely new challenges each day.

See you at AI2Future!