Smart Cameras Blog

[From Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Research News 08-2008-Topic 5]

Smart camera aficionados may remember that IBM started its work on smart cameras to tell a cumquat from a rutabaga for grocery stores. But security emerged as a more profitable outlet and the rest of us now wait patiently for vegetables to be manually entered. But another group has taken on this task:

Working on behalf of the industrial weighing company Mettler-Toledo, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing IITB in Karlsruhe have developed a webcam module for self-service scales. “The scales automatically recognize which fruit or vegetables are to be weighed and ask the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant – such as tomatoes, vine-ripened tomatoes and beefsteak tomatoes,” states IITB scientist Sascha Voth. Customers can confirm the correct variety on a touch screen.

But how do the scales know whether the customer has placed a pepper, a tomato or a kiwi fruit on them? “The goods are registered by a camera integrated in the scales. An image evaluation algorithm compares the image with stored data and thus automatically recognizes which type of fruit this is,” says Voth. Even the cloudy plastic bags in which the fruit may be packaged at the counter are no problem for the scales – the image evaluation system recognizes the various types of fruit and vegetable anyway.

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