By Ankit Narayan Singh
The retail industry is undergoing a rapid transformation as consumers demand more convenience, variety, and personalisation. Retailers and consumer goods manufacturers (FMCG companies) need to optimise their shelf space, product visibility, and pricing strategies to meet these expectations and stay ahead of the competition. However, traditional methods of collecting and analysing shelf data are often slow, costly, and inaccurate, resulting in lost sales opportunities and customer dissatisfaction.
To overcome these challenges, retailers and FMCG companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can provide real-time, accurate, and actionable insights on shelf conditions. One such tool is Single Shot SKU Detector, a novel technique that can train an image recognition model with just one image per product category to identify SKUs. This reduces the need for large and diverse datasets, which are often difficult to obtain and maintain in the fast changing retail landscape.
How Single Shot SKU Detection Works?
The Single Shot SKU Detector is based on the idea that, like humans, an AI model can begin to identify a new object after observing just one example. Humans can learn to recognize an apple after being shown it once or twice. Similarly, in computer vision, a single image can capture the essential features of a product category, such as shape, color, and logo. By using this image as a reference, an AI model can identify similar products when they are placed on a shelf in a retail store or scanned at a checkout counter.
The Single Shot SKU Detector utilizes single shot object detection techniques, based on foundation models trained on vast datasets. These foundation models form a baseline, enabling the detector to learn complex patterns with minimal data. The deep neural network, comprising multiple layers, requires only a few reference images to understand key object characteristics like shape and colour. It then generalizes this learning to new, unseen images. This makes the Single Shot SKU Detector efficient and practical for real-world applications where large-scale data collection and annotation are challenging and expensive.
Benefits of Single Shot SKU Detector
Single Shot SKU Detector offers several benefits for retailers and FMCG companies who want to improve their shelf condition insights and drive incremental sales. Some of these benefits are:
- Reduced data collection and labelling costs: Single Shot SKU Detector requires only one image per product category to train the model, which can be easily obtained from existing sources, such as product catalogues, websites, or packaging.
- Increased data quality and accuracy: Single Shot SKU Detector ensures that the data used for training the model is consistent and representative of the product category, as it is derived from the official product images.
- Faster and easier model deployment and maintenance: Single Shot SKU Detector enables rapid and seamless model deployment, as it can adapt to different store layouts, lighting conditions, and product variations with minimal human intervention.
How Single Shot SKU Detector Improves Shelf Condition Insights and Drives Incremental Sales
Single Shot SKU Detector can help retailers and FMCG companies improve their shelf condition insights and drive incremental sales by providing them with valuable information and recommendations on various key performance indicators (KPIs), such as:
- Planogram compliance: Single Shot SKU Detector can measure the degree of adherence to the planned arrangement of products on the shelf, which is designed to optimise product visibility, availability, and sales. Moreover, it can easily adapt to the changes in planogram since it can learn from just one sample.
- Share of shelf: Single Shot SKU Detector can calculate the percentage of shelf space occupied by each product category, brand, or SKU, which reflects the relative importance and demand of each product.
- Point of sale material (POSM) compliance: Single Shot SKU Detector can evaluate the presence and effectiveness of POSM, such as banners, posters, or displays, which are used to attract, inform, and persuade customers to buy the products.
- Price tag compliance: Single Shot SKU Detector can check the accuracy and consistency of the price tags on the products, which are essential for customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Several Benefits of Retailers and FMCG companies
By using Single Shot SKU Detector to monitor and improve these KPIs, retailers and FMCG companies can achieve several benefits, such as:
- Increased sales and profits: As per a report published by IHL Research, retailers and FMCG companies lose more than $1 trillion in annual sales due to shoppers not being able to find the product they are looking for on the shelf. By using advanced techniques like the Single Shot SKU Detector, retailers and FMCG companies can identify what’s missing or misplaced from the shelf simply by taking a photo. This ensures that these products are replenished quickly, helping them to increase their sales and profits.
- Enhanced customer experience and loyalty: By ensuring that planograms are properly maintained all the time, retailers and FMCG companies can enhance their customer experience and loyalty by providing them with a pleasant, convenient, and personalised shopping journey.
- Improved operational efficiency and effectiveness: Single Shot SKU Detector can help retailers and FMCG companies improve their operational efficiency and effectiveness by reducing the time, cost, and effort involved in collecting and analysing shelf data.
Conclusion
Single Shot SKU Detector is a powerful and innovative AI tool that can provide real-time, accurate, and actionable insights on shelf conditions, and help retailers and FMCG companies improve their shelf condition insights and drive incremental sales. Single Shot SKU Detector requires only one image per product category, which reduces the data collection and labelling costs, increases the data quality and accuracy, and enables faster and easier model deployment and maintenance. Single Shot SKU Detector can also measure and improve various KPIs, such as planogram compliance, share of shelf, POSM compliance, and price tag compliance, which can lead to increased sales and profits, enhanced customer experience and loyalty, and improved operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Single Shot SKU Detector is one of the AI solutions offered by ParallelDots, a leading AI company that provides cutting-edge image recognition and natural language processing technologies for various industries, such as retail, healthcare, and media. ParallelDots aims to empower businesses with AI tools that can help them make smarter decisions, optimize their processes, and enhance their performance.
The author is co-founder, CTO, ParallelDots
