Computer vision project presented at the AI2Future

The AI2Future conference, the leading event of the year for the AI industry in Croatia, was held on October 13 and 14, 2022 in Zagreb, organized by the CroAI association. The conference brought together representatives of the Croatian AI community of companies and startups developing products, services and solutions based on artificial intelligence.

Together with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing from Zagreb we presented a joint AI project of developing a system for visual recognition of products on the shelves. Robert Jambrečić, Machine Learning Engineer, and Associate Professor Ph.D. Marko Subašić from FER introduced the participants to the business applications of the retail store item detection and how they were 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.

The AI2Future conference gathered more than 350 participants at this 6th edition of the conference, which is also the annual conference of the CroAI association, which presented AI Landscape 3.0, a survey of the AI scene in Croatia. The conference also discussed the activities of European countries in the field of artificial intelligence, the application of AI in healthcare, and the possibility of machines developing a certain level of consciousness.

In case you missed this edition of the conference, and you are interested in the possibilities of applying computer vision for your business, feel free to contact our experts at poslovna.rjesenja@megatrend.com for more information.