Interview: Embedded Vision Opportunities and Challenges in Retail Checkout


Date:  Wednesday, May 22

Start Time: 4:15 pm

End Time: 4:45 pm

In this interview, Toly Kotlarsky of Zebra Technologies will discuss computer vision challenges and opportunities in grocery stores and other retail environments, especially in traditional checkout and self-checkout applications. He will highlight key challenges that have inhibited the use of computer vision, including performance, accuracy, cost, ergonomics, power consumption and the use of plastic produce bags. Toly will explain some of the approaches that are used to address these challenges, discuss edge-vs.-cloud trade-offs and provide insights for technology suppliers on what they can do to help make computer vision ubiquitous in these applications.

Track

Session Speakers

  • Phil Lapsley is a Co-Founder and Vice President at the engineering consulting firm BDTI and Vice President of Business Development at the Edge AI and Vision Alliance. At BDTI he leads computer vision and embedded AI projects. Previously, he worked at several start-ups, as well as at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting company that advises Fortune 100 companies on business strategy. He holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of Exploding the Phone (2014), a history of the first network hackers, co-author of DSP Processor Fundamentals (1997) and inventor or co-inventor on 26 patents. He is also the co-creator of Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP; Internet standard RFC 977) and was a contributor to the Berkeley UNIX project.

  • Since the mid-1990s, Toly has focused on developing image processing systems. At the start-up Auto Image ID, where he was Director of Software Engineering, he and his team developed the world’s first industrial smart camera, called HawkEye. In 2003 he joined Metrologic Instruments, later acquired by Honeywell, to lead the Advanced Development R & D Group and oversee the development of imaging products and technologies. Metrologic’s first imaging barcode scanner, called Focus, developed by his team and released to production in 2005, was the world’s first imaging barcode scanner adopted by a top retail chain. Imaging technologies and products developed by Toly’s team were the key factors in the acquisition of Metrologic by Honeywell and led to a transformation of the retail industry. Since 2010, Toly has proudly worked for Zebra Technologies, where he currently focuses on AI applications at the edge in devices with limited resources.


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Interview: Embedded Vision Opportunities and Challenges in Retail Checkout