A Robust Prototype-Free Retrieval Method for Automatic Check-Out

In recent years, automatic check-out (ACO) gains increasing interest and has been widely used in daily life. However, current works mainly rely on both counter and product prototype images in the training phase, and it is hard to maintain the performance in an incremental setting. To deal with this problem, we propose a robust prototype-free retrieval method (ROPREM) for ACO, which is a cascaded framework composed of a product detector module and a product retrieval module. We use the product detector module without product class information to locate products. Additionally, we first attempt the check-out process as a retrieval process rather than a classification process. The retrieval result is considered as the product class by comparing the feature similarity between a query image and gallery templates. As a result, our method require much fewer training samples and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public Retail Product Checkout (RPC) dataset.