PIWIMS: Physics Informed Warehouse Inventory Monitory via Synthetic Data Generation

Abstract

State-of-The-Art camera-based deep learning methods for inventory monitoring tend to fail to generalize across different domains due to the high variance of scene settings. Large amounts of human labor are required to label and parameterize the models, making a real-world deployment impractical. In a third-party warehouse setting, supervised learning approaches are either too costly and/or inaccurate to deploy due to the need for human labor to address the diverse set of environmental factors (i.e, lighting conditions, product motion, deployment limitations). We introduce, a realistic synthetic dataset generation technique that combines the physical constraints of the scene in real-world deployments, drastically reducing the need for human labeling. In contrast to other generative techniques, where the generative parameters are learned from a large sample of available data, this compositive approach defines the parameters based on physical characteristics of the particular task, which requires minimal human annotation. We demonstrate performance in a 4-month real operating warehouse deployment and show that with only 32 manually labeled images per object, can achieve an accuracy of up to 87% in inventory tracking, which is a 28% increase when compared to traditional data augmentation techniques and 31% error reduction when compared to the third-party warehouse industry average. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of to generalize across different camera angles and positions by achieving an accuracy of 85% in inventory tracking while varying the position and angle of the camera.