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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

"Amazon won’t say much about how the system works, other than to say it involves sophisticated computer vision and machine learning software." Why do I have the feeling this probably actually translates to humans staring at video feeds a lot of the time?

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I imagine it's similar to the below video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeS8TJwBAFs

Jordan from Standard Cognition here (that's a video of our autonomous checkout system). From what we've read about Amazon it sounds like we're approaching things very differently. Amazon uses sensor fusion, including lots of non-vision sensors (floor sensors, shelf sensors, potentially RFID as a supplemental signal). We do everything from ceiling cameras, nothing else. That makes the system harder to build, but much easier to deploy to lots of existing stores. Amazon's solution requires a hefty remodeling.

Your comment intrigued me, so I found this article:

https://www.recode.net/2018/1/21/16913984/what-does-photos-a...

I don't think there can be any floor sensors there. There may be inventory-counting shelf sensors, I have no idea. There definitely isn't RFID. Looks like massive camera arrays in the ceiling.

I wonder how resilient it is to real life shoppers who pick things, then put them back at the wrong place.

Jordan from Standard Cognition here (that's a video of our autonomous checkout system). We don't depend on the shelf location an item came from. You can put things back anywhere you like and the system behaves just fine. It's one of the advantages of using a pure vision system as opposed to a sensor fusion approach with sensors on the shelves.

55 seconds in it does show them grabbing misplaced items, if that's what you mean.

This video is fantastic. It seems to be ready for prime time. Ability to track objects with this high accuracy is a gamechanger

Even if this is the case, it gives them a more straightforward path to incrementally improving the automation behind the scenes without having any visible customer impact.

Heh I bet you’re right.

>“We’ve just put associates on different kinds of tasks where we think it adds to the customer experience,” Ms. Puerini said.

I thought they were going to use some kind of RFID system.

Using cameras and shelf sensors seem a little archaic for tracking retail purchases in real time. I wonder what happens when the store is extremely busy or people are taking things off shelves and putting them back.

I wondered why we were still using barcodes in shops when you could do the checkout in one go with RFIDs. Turns out that the last time I checked, RFIDs are quite expensive, something like 10 cent a piece. A minor cost if you are selling electronics, but too expensive relative to the price of a chocolate bar.

Because YouTube just realised they have to exactly this to keep advertisers happy.

The "Our AI/ML technology is in Bangladesh" rollout

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