CheckSORT: Refined Synthetic Data Combination and Optimized SORT for Automatic Retail Checkout

In this paper, we propose a method called CheckSORT for automatic retail checkout. We demonstrate CheckSORT on the multi-class product counting and recognition task in Track 4 of AI CITY CHALLENGE 2023. This task aims to count and identify products as they move along a retail checkout white tray, which is challenging due to occlusion, similar appearance, or blur. Based on the constraints and training data provided by the sponsor, we propose two new ideas to solve this task. The first idea is to design a controllable synthetic training data generation paradigm to bridge the gap between training data and real test videos as much as possible. The second innovation is to improve the efficiency of existing SORT tracking algorithms by proposing decomposed Kalman filter and dynamic tracklet feature sequence. Our experiments resulted in state-of-the-art (when compared with DeepSORT and StrongSORT) F1-scores of 70.3% and 62.1% on the TestA data of AI CITY CHALLENGE 2022 and 2023 respectively in the estimation of the time (in seconds) for the product to appear on the tray. Training and testing code will be available soon on github.