I was telling a friend who’d never seen these about them, and we were speculating how they work. Initially we guessed scanners on all sides that could read barcodes, but we realized barcodes counter-side down couldn’t be read. So then we assumed cameras, but wondered if it was AI guessing, or if every item a Circle K sells has a 3D scan in its database to identify it.
As far as I’m concerned it’s super cool witchcraft, but we’re looking for a definitive answer. All I could find on online was people complaining about it, or articles all using the same verbage and calling it “computer vision”.
In: Technology
The self checkouts are like the other commenter noted are mashgins. They use an array of cameras at different angles against a plotted background to use machine learning of pattern recognition to identify product. They do struggle with similar shapes so they also use special qr codes to help the unit. Source: installer for these things
https://www.mashgin.com/
This is the company that provide the technology. As you suspected it’s AI based image recognition. They obviously know what products they are selling so they can train the AI with a fairly comprehensive data set. It’s a cool evolution of the technology for sure. Historically this kind of thing has been tried with RFID but the costs weren’t really scalable
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