Search Results (5)

This article presents an inventory classification method that provides more accurate results in the white goods factory, which will contribute to sustainability, sustainability economics, and supply chain management targets. A novel inventory classification application is presented with real-world data. Two different datasets are used, and these datasets are compared to each other. These larger dataset is Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)-based (6.032 SKUs), and the smaller one is product-group-based (270 product groups). In the first phase, Artificial Intelligence (AI) clustering methods that have not been used in the field of inventory classification, to our knowledge, are applied to these datasets; the results are obtained and compared using K-Means, Gaussian mixture, agglomerative clustering, and spectral clustering methods. In the second stage, an autoencoder is separately hybridized with the AI clustering methods to develop a novel approach to inventory classification. Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) is used in the third step to classify inventories. At the end of the study, these nine different methodologies (“K-Means, Gaussian mixture, agglomerative clustering, spectral clustering” with and without the autoencoder and Fuzzy C-Means) are compared using two different datasets. It is shown that the proposed new hybrid method gives much better results than classical AI methods. Full article

A typical retailer carries 10,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs). However, these numbers may exceed hundreds of millions for giants such as Walmart and Amazon. Besides the volume, SKU data can also be high-dimensional, which means that SKUs can be segmented on the basis of various attributes. Given the data volumes and the multitude of potentially important dimensions to consider, it becomes computationally impossible to individually manage each SKU. Even though the application of clustering for SKU segmentation is common, previous studies do not address the problem of parametrization and model finetuning, which may be extremely tedious and time-consuming in real-world applications. Our work closes the research gap by proposing a solution that leverages automated machine learning for the automated cluster analysis of SKUs. The proposed framework for automated SKU segmentation incorporates minibatch K-means clustering, principal component analysis, and grid search for parameter tuning. It operates on top of the Apache Parquet file format, an efficient, structured, compressed, column-oriented, and big-data-friendly format. The proposed solution was tested on the basis of a real-world dataset that contained data at the pallet level. Full article

Object detection is a predominant challenge in computer vision and image processing to detect instances of objects of various classes within an image or video. Recently, a new domain of vehicular platforms, e-scooters, has been widely used across domestic and urban environments. The driving behavior of e-scooter users significantly differs from other vehicles on the road, and their interactions with pedestrians are also increasing. To ensure pedestrian safety and develop an efficient traffic monitoring system, a reliable object detection system for e-scooters is required. However, existing object detectors based on IoU loss functions suffer various drawbacks when dealing with densely packed objects or inaccurate predictions. To address this problem, a new loss function, balanced-IoU (BIoU), is proposed in this article. This loss function considers the parameterized distance between the centers and the minimum and maximum edges of the bounding boxes to address the localization problem. With the help of synthetic data, a simulation experiment was carried out to analyze the bounding box regression of various losses. Extensive experiments have been carried out on a two-stage object detector, MASK_RCNN, and single-stage object detectors such as YOLOv5n6, YOLOv5x on Microsoft Common Objects in Context, SKU110k, and our custom e-scooter dataset. The proposed loss function demonstrated an increment of 3.70% at $A{P}_S$ on the COCO dataset, 6.20% at AP55 on SKU110k, and 9.03% at AP80 of the custom e-scooter dataset. Full article

Object counting is an indispensable task in manufacturing and management. Recently, the development of image-processing techniques and deep learning object detection has achieved excellent performance in object-counting tasks. Accordingly, we propose a novel small-size smart counting system composed of a low-cost hardware device and a cloud-based object-counting software server to implement an accurate counting function and overcome the trade-off presented by the computing power of local hardware. The cloud-based object-counting software consists of a model adapted to the object-counting task through a novel DBC-NMS (our own technique) and hyperparameter tuning of deep-learning-based object-detection methods. With the power of DBC-NMS and hyperparameter tuning, the performance of the cloud-based object-counting software is competitive over commonly used public datasets (CARPK and SKU110K) and our custom dataset of small pills. Our cloud-based object-counting software achieves an mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.03 and a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.20 on the Pill dataset. These results demonstrate that the proposed smart counting system accurately detects and counts densely distributed object scenes. In addition, the proposed system shows a reasonable and efficient cost–performance ratio by converging low-cost hardware and cloud-based software. Full article

Parcel detection is crucial to achieving automatic sorting in intelligent logistics systems. Most parcels in logistics centers are currently detected manually, imposing low efficiency and high error rate, severely limiting logistics transportation efficiency. Therefore, there is an urgent need for automated parcel detection. However, parcels in logistics centers have challenges such as dense stacking, occlusion and background interference, making it difficult for existing methods to detect parcels accurately. To address the above problem, we developed an improved Faster R-CNN-based parcel detection model spurred by current deep-learning-based object detection trends. The proposed method first solves the false detection problem due to parcel mutual occlusion by augmenting Faster R-CNN with an edge detection branch and adding object edge loss to the loss function. Furthermore, the self-attention ROI Align module is proposed to address the problem of feature misalignment caused by the quantization rounding operation in the ROI Pooling module. The module uses an attention mechanism to filter and enhance the features and uses bilinear interpolation to calculate the feature pixel values, improving detection accuracy. The implementation of the proposed method was validated using parcel images collected in the field and the public dataset SKU110K and compared with four existing parcel detection methods. The results show that our method’s Recall, Precision, map@0.5 and Fps are 96.89%, 98.76%, 98.42% and 22.83%, respectively, which significantly improves the parcel detection accuracy. Full article