Toward New Retail: A Benchmark Dataset for Smart Unmanned Vending Machines

Deep learning is a popular direction in computer vision and digital image processing. It is widely utilized in many fields, such as robot navigation, intelligent video surveillance, industrial inspection, and aerospace. With the extensive use of deep learning techniques, classification and object detection algorithms have been rapidly developed. In recent years, with the introduction of the concept of “unmanned retail,” object detection, and image classification play a central role in unmanned retail applications. However, open-source datasets of traditional classification and object detection have not yet been optimized for application scenarios of unmanned retail. Currently, classification and object detection datasets do not exist that focus on unmanned retail solely. Therefore, in order to promote unmanned retail applications by using deep learning-based classification and object detection, in this article we collected more than 30 000 images of unmanned retail containers using a refrigerator affixed with different cameras under both static and dynamic recognition environments. These images were categorized into ten kinds of beverages. After manual labeling, images in our constructed dataset contained 155 153 instances, each of which was annotated with a bounding box. We performed extensive experiments on this dataset using ten state-of-the-art deep learning-based models. Experimental results indicate great potential of using these deep learning-based models for real-world smart unmanned vending machines.