Object Size Recognition as Intra-class Variations using Transfer Learning

The ability to differentiate various products in the retail store plays an essential role to provide effectiveness to customers and reduce or even eliminate long queues. However, traditional machine learning algorithms are incapable of recognizing many subordinate categories in various retail product. This paper aims to recognize the retail product recognition algorithm based on the YOLOv7 model in terms of intra-class variations, with the sub-categories of brand and size. We used two schemes of the dataset to compare recognition performance between them. Firstly, the YOLOv7 is applied in the two schemes of the dataset that is annotated with the subordinate category to detect the brand as meta category. Secondly, the proposed method is applied by adding the object size classification into the YOLOv7 model where the square area of the bounding box was calculated to classify the product according to size. Confidence score and square area are used to verify the object and to obtain the product size, which represents sub-category of the product. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves higher recall compared to baseline object detection.