Products-6K: A Large-Scale Groceries Product Recognition Dataset

Product recognition is a task that receives continuous attention by the computer vision/deep learning community mainly with the scope of providing robust solutions for automatic checkout supermarkets. One of the main challenges is the lack of images that illustrate in realistic conditions a high number of products. Here the product recognition task is perceived slightly differently compared to the automatic checkout paradigm but the challenges encountered are the same. The setting under which this dataset is captured is with the aim to help individuals with visual impairment in doing their daily grocery in order to increase their autonomy. In particular, we propose a large-scale dataset utilized to tackle the product recognition problem in a supermarket environment. The dataset is characterized by (a) large scale in terms of unique products associated with one or more photos from different viewpoints, (b) rich textual descriptions linked to different levels of annotation and, (c) images acquired both in laboratory conditions and in a realistic supermarket scenario portrayed in various clutter and lighting conditions. A direct comparison with existing datasets of this category demonstrates the significantly higher number of the available unique products, as well as the richness of its annotation enabling different recognition scenarios. Finally, the dataset is also benchmarked using various approaches based both on visual and textual descriptors