OCR-based Inventory Management Algorithms Robust to Damaged Images

Accurate and fast inventory management algorithms are essential in the modern distribution industry. However, the configuration process of inventory management algorithms is very expensive, and the direct comprehensive management of inventory procedures is labor intensive and inaccurate. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an optical character recognition (OCR)-based inventory management algorithm to resolve these practical issues. The main purpose of our inventory management algorithm is to automatically inspect whether a list of items and the actual items match. To this end, our method consists of three steps, namely, text detection, text recognition, and text matching. In addition, to expand our algorithm to real-world applications, we propose adversarial training to ensure robustness against various damaged images, including corruption, blur, and inappropriate viewpoints. To train the network, we construct a new inventory management dataset (IMD) consisting of 10,000 sheets in real retail store environments. We verify our algorithm on the public dataset and our new IMD. As a result, we experimentally demonstrate that our method is not only robust against various damaged images but is also easily applicable in both large and small scale distributions stores at a low cost. Our code and dataset is available at https://blog.airlab.re.kr/Deform-and-Recover/.