Supermarket Product Detection and Recognition: Utilizing Deep Learning with Rectified Imagery

Automated product recognition is a cornerstone of modern retail intelligence; however, accurately matching real-world, in-store images against extensive corporate catalogs remains a major scalability bottleneck for large-scale applications. In this work, we address this challenge by reformulating the task as an embedding-based cross-domain retrieval problem rather than a standard closed-set classification task. Specifically, we define the objective as retrieving the most corresponding catalog reference image for a given real-world product query crop from an expansive inventory. To bridge the severe domain gap between pristine studio packshots and noisy in-store queries, we introduce a novel catalog-to-real multi-stage contrastive learning paradigm (Cat2Real). This framework fine-tunes a vision backbone by systematically exploiting both item-level and image-level similarities to drive targeted hard negative mining. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our paradigm scales seamlessly to unseen products and categories, yielding outstanding zero-shot generalization performance even in the complete absence of real-world training images for novel inventory.

Multimodal product retrieval (MPR) underpins checkout-free retail and automated inventory systems, yet it demands fine-grained SKU discrimination that standard vision-language benchmarks fail to capture. We present the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of 190 open-source VLMs on the MPR task of the GroceryVision Challenge, isolating pre-training data, architecture, and input resolution. Our analysis yields three actionable findings. \textbf{(1) Data quality trumps scale.} Switching from raw web-scrapes to filtered datasets delivers up to 16.6% accuracy gains, exceeding the benefit of doubling model parameters. \textbf{(2) Efficient models can win.} MobileCLIP-B (150M parameters) outperforms 351M counterparts trained on noisy data. We introduce \textit{semantic power density} ($φ$), an efficiency metric that penalizes sub-threshold accuracy. \textbf{(3) A precision gap persists.} State-of-the-art models achieve 94.5% Recall@5 but suffer a 17.5% drop at Recall@1, revealing that contrastive embeddings cluster categories effectively but fail to rank visually similar SKUs. Code and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/upeee/openmpr.

Image correction and rectangling are valuable tasks in practical photography systems such as smartphones. Recent remarkable advancements in deep learning have undeniably brought about substantial performance improvements in these fields. Nevertheless, existing methods mainly rely on task-specific architectures. This significantly restricts their generalization ability and effective application across a wide range of different tasks. In this paper, we introduce the Unified Rectification Framework (UniRect), a comprehensive approach that addresses these practical tasks from a consistent distortion rectification perspective. Our approach incorporates various task-specific inverse problems into a general distortion model by simulating different types of lenses. To handle diverse distortions, UniRect adopts one task-agnostic rectification framework with a dual-component structure: a {Deformation Module}, which utilizes a novel Residual Progressive Thin-Plate Spline (RP-TPS) model to address complex geometric deformations, and a subsequent Restoration Module, which employs Residual Mamba Blocks (RMBs) to counteract the degradation caused by the deformation process and enhance the fidelity of the output image. Moreover, a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoEs) structure is designed to circumvent heavy task competition in multi-task learning due to varying distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our models have achieved state-of-the-art performance compared with other up-to-date methods.