#NRF2018 YI TUNNEL #AI Image Recognition
Beijing based startup YI TUNNEL exhibited at #NRF2018 and for those retailers, who managed to get to Level 1, were in for a treat with some clever #AI visual recognition programming that YI TUNNEL hopes will redefine the retail landscape – the thing about NRF that always concerns me, is how many of the proper big retailers get to any other Level than 3 or the big conferences, Ed.
Retailers would have seen a refrigerator equipped with cameras that could detect what was put in and taken out of the ‘fridge’. Cans of coca-cola, beer, slabs of cheese, packets of fries (who keeps fries in the fridge?) were all automatically detected by the software, one assumes using a clever combination of colour, shape etc.
YI TUNNEL had connected a little diagnostic screen in their booth and you could see the GET and PUT instructions being displayed when anything was moved in or out. In about 95% of cases it also detected two or more objects in one-hand being taken out! YI TUNNEL explained that back home, the software would have been much more accurate as it would have had full access to the machine learning built up in the past.
Interestingly, rather than ship one of their proper working #AI refrigerators from China, YI TUNNEL purchased a standard ‘fridge’ in New York, then before the show, furiously worked to add all their mechanics to it. Whatever they did, it worked and was mighty impressive.
Also on their stand was an automatic cash register / self-service kiosk that works by ‘looking’. You could place or throw almost anything they had to and onto the kiosk and it would recognise it; T-Shirts, tins of beans, vegetables etc. It could even detect the difference between different types of Apples and they demonstrated this with two separate varieties. You’d at first think this might be easy as it was simple red or green but it was much cleverer than that.
YI Tunnel describes itself as the most innovative AI company in China (all of they company’s computer vision experts are from the prestigious Tsinghua University) and the company has received investments from Baidu Ventures, Kinzon Capital, and Fengshion Capital.
It’s possibly fair to say that this company’s image recognition technology could completely replace RFID tags, barcode scanners, and (people) cashiers.
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