Using Keypoint Matching and Interactive Self Attention Network to verify Retail POSMs
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for retail marketing by providing an incremental improvement in computer vision-based verification of merchandising displays.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying Point of Sale Materials (POSMs) in retail stores by checking if all desired components are present in shelf images, using a supervised neural network method that significantly enhances accuracy over an unsupervised baseline and shows generalization across POSM materials.
Point of Sale Materials(POSM) are the merchandising and decoration items that are used by companies to communicate product information and offers in retail stores. POSMs are part of companies' retail marketing strategy and are often applied as stylized window displays around retail shelves. In this work, we apply computer vision techniques to the task of verification of POSMs in supermarkets by telling if all desired components of window display are present in a shelf image. We use Convolutional Neural Network based unsupervised keypoint matching as a baseline to verify POSM components and propose a supervised Neural Network based method to enhance the accuracy of baseline by a large margin. We also show that the supervised pipeline is not restricted to the POSM material it is trained on and can generalize. We train and evaluate our model on a private dataset composed of retail shelf images.