Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSPlanning the shop layout is one of the most crucial tasks in the retail business nowadays. A well-planned retail store layout allows a retailer to maximize the sales for each square foot of the allocated selling space within the store.
In a supermarket, the right placement of products determines significantly the number of sold items.
To maximize the overall income, supermarkets optimize the shelf layout and put products with a high profit margin on prominent places in the aisles.
The wrong placement of a product might not only result in less revenue, but also in contractual penalties. As the shop layout changes frequently, there is a permanent need for control and validation.
Fraunhofer Portugal started a project that intends to bring innovation to the retail business and reduce the costs in this core operation. Its main concern is to automate validation, by creating virtual shop navigation system with real shop images and check for product misplacements.
The ShopView solution is composed by a camera buggy and a software component. The camera buggy will be operated by a normal clerk to semi-automatically capture high quality images of the aisles.
> In a first phase the software component is responsible for performing several image processing steps and for presenting the images to the management for control;
> In a second phase the amount of human interaction will be reduced to a minimum by using image recognition technology to automate the controlling of the product placement.
The ShopView system will significantly decrease the rate of wrong product placements while decreasing costs of control and validation.
The project includes Wedo and Modelo Continente as partners and it is co-funded by FEDER through COMPETE - Programa Operacional Temático Fatores de Competitividade and was approved under SI ID&T – individual project, in accordance AAC nº 08/SI/2012.