Counterfeit Over-The-Counter Medication Detection Utilizing One-Stage Object Detection And Data Augmentation

The surge in counterfeit over-the-counter medications necessitates innovative solutions for authentication. Research has shown that in the past several years, the rise of counterfeit over-the-counter medications being imported into the Philippines has steadily increased and is one of the largest markets for counterfeit over-the-counter medication in Southeast Asia. This study pioneers an object detection tool made for counterfeit medicine detection to alleviate the burden on consumers for determining the quality and authenticity of over-the-counter medications. Leveraging the You Only Look Once version 5 is a one-stage object detection algorithm that analyzes objects quicker than most other object detection algorithms. Albumentations library to incorporate image augmentation to alter the image data to have different orientations, cropping, brightness, and contrast. Results showed that models trained with augmentation techniques had better model performance compared to the models trained without augmentation. Usability test results showed that the web application created to house these models was able to facilitate correct object detection.