Inventorying store items is a general demand for retail stores and supermarkets. This is usually performed manually by counting items and visually checking the correct placement. Tracking changes in inventory helps business owners evaluate performance of each product, validate correct placement, and set future restocking plans. With the cloud making AI and machine learning (ML) scenarios more popular in recent years, you can use deep learning to build automatic solutions for inventory management and planning. Instead of relying on manual counting and recording, computer vision-based solutions can predict the brand and quantity of a product from an image.
Developing a custom model to analyze images is a significant undertaking that requires time, expertise, and resources, often taking months to complete. Additionally, it often requires thousands or tens of thousands of hand-labeled images to train the model to make accurate decisions. Generating this data can take months to gather and requires