Authors:
Andrew Norris, Adam Archambault, Valentine Mourzenok
Abstract:
This disclosure proposes a system to take images of the aisles and update the store’s website to show customers if their items are on the shelves before entering the store.
Background:
Automatic inventory management systems can be prone to error or be inaccurate. For one example, an item could be registered as “out of stock” in the point-of-sale system, but another customer could have come into the store, returned the same item, and it’s already back on the shelf. The goal of this solution is to provide customers a way to actually “see” what is on the shelf before even entering the store.
Description:
Various types of camera configurations could work. One such configuration would be static cameras mounted above the shelves that have a viewing angle that includes all items on the shelves. Another configuration would be positioning single cameras on rails, and those cameras would traverse the aisles capturing images of the shelf contents. In any configuration, the cameras would upload the pictures to a centralized system and be collated so they can be associated with the items in the catalog. When a customer is preparing their shopping list, the item view on the store’s website would include the most recent image of the position in the aisle where the item is located along with a timestamp on when the picture was last updated.
Usages:
The store would set up a job manager that will trigger the cameras to do their job of capturing the images of the shelves every, for example, 30 minutes. The cameras would capture their images and store them in a centralized image repository. The online catalog would access the image repository to present the related image alongside the item.
Enabling Technology:
Cameras, an online item catalog, a centralized image storage solution
TGCS Reference 2261
