PhD defense: Tobias Pettersson

Tobias Pettersson defends his PhD thesis "Product Recognition with OCR Text: Advancing Grocery Product Recognition through Robust Approaches, Fine-Grained Recognition, and Domain Adaptation for Real-Time Performance".

The PhD thesis defense will be held at ASSAR Industrial Innovation Arena in Skövde. 

Abstract

The physical retail sector faces challenges in improving operational efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing customer experience. Over the past decade, companies have introduced product recognition technology solutions to improve checkout efficiency, inventory management, and fraud detection. However, most initiatives have struggled to scale or achieve sufficient accuracy due to the complex nature of physical retail, which includes a large number of products that continuously change, as well as varied environmental conditions. In parallel, academic research has tackled many of these challenges by providing datasets and new methods to improve recognition performance, but considerable challenges persist.

This thesis addresses three main challenges in grocery product recognition: robust recognition, recognition of visually similar products, and domain adaptation between different retail systems. To address these challenges, the work centers on the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract textual information found on product packaging for product recognition. With extensive experiments and the creation of a dataset, the results show that OCR-based methods for product recognition can improve recognition robustness, enable more accurate differentiation between similar products, and also work across different retail systems.

Therefore, the main contribution of this thesis is the development and validation of these OCR text-based methods and approaches, specifically designed to address the requirements in physical retail.

Supervisors

Maria Riveiro, Professor, Jönköping University
Tuwe Löfström, Senior Lecturer, Jönköping University
Anna Syberfeldt, Professor, University of Skövde

Opponent

Prayag Tiwari, Senior Lecturer, Halmstad University

Committee

Martin Boldt, Senior Lecturer, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Sepideh Pashami, Docent, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
Yacine Atif, Professor, University of Skövde