A Study on the Automated Payment System for Artificial Intelligence-Based Product Recognition in the Age of Contactless Services

Abstract

Contactless service is rapidly emerging as a new growth strategy due to consumers who are reluctant to the face-to-face situation in the global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and various technologies are being developed to support the fast-growing contactless service market. In particular, the restaurant industry is one of the most desperate industrial fields requiring technologies for contactless service, and the representative technical case should be a kiosk, which has the advantage of reducing labor costs for the restaurant owners and provides psychological relaxation and satisfaction to the customer. In this paper, we propose a solution to the restaurant's store operation through the unmanned kiosk using a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) technology of image recognition. Especially, for the products that do not have barcodes in bakeries, fresh foods (fruits, vegetables, etc.), and autonomous restaurants on highways, which cause increased labor costs and many hassles, our proposed system should be very useful. The proposed system recognizes products without barcodes on the ground of image-based AI algorithm technology and makes automatic payments. To test the proposed system feasibility, we established an AI vision system using a commercial camera and conducted an image recognition test by training object detection AI models using donut images. The proposed system has a self-learning system with mismatched information in operation. The self-learning AI technology allows us to upgrade the recognition performance continuously. We proposed a fully automated payment system with AI vision technology and showed system feasibility by the performance test. The system realizes contactless service for self-checkout in the restaurant business area and improves the cost-saving in managing human resources.