Vision based intelligent shelf-management system

Abstract

Currently supermarkets are more popular, and the local stores are leaving the competition. when people go to supermarkets, they find various items stocked on seemingly unlimited shelves. Supermarket shelves needed to be filled with the items accordingly. The most common problems in the supermarkets are identifying the empty shelves, on-shelf availability, and future sales. The labors cannot always track the empty shelves and on shelf availability levels due to their workloads. Moreover, it is a time-consuming method for the labors which can affect the customer satisfaction and business profit. Every month, supermarkets buy the required number of products from related manufacturing companies by analyzing the previously purchased products and their sales. This is usually done manually by managing excel sheets which is also time consuming and not reliable. Especially during the seasonal times or pandemic situations they cannot use the manual method which must also be done as fast as possible. Therefore, this system can be used to assist in empty shelf detection, percentage of on-shelf availability and in the prediction of future sales. The implementation of on-shelves percentage detection service is done using machine learning. Machine learning processes are carried out for implementing the necessary functionalities and algorithms. Initially, the camera captures clear and real time images regularly. Then the system processes and detects the image similar to the threshold percentage or detect the empty shelves. When the system detects the threshold percentage or empty shelves, the system will provide an alert to the labors. The Implementation of the predicting the future supply and demands is done using time series analysis using several existing machine learning algorithms by utilizing historical data. In this research the prediction of future sales and demand in the supermarkets is done by considering the customers' behavior, the variety of product groups they buy and seasonal changes. These predictions are made on the assumption of a constant per capital supply of products and demand in our system.