Ah, Japanese bakeries. Rows and rows of delicious, fresh-baked treats ready for you to harvest—if you can decide among all the variety. And if you think choosing which bread to place on your tray is hard (I usually spend at least 5 minutes walking in circles with hungry tongs in hand), imagine how stressful it must be for part-time bakery staff who need to remember the names of every baked good in the store.
Luckily, Japanese web development company Brain Corporation has teamed up with the University of Hyogo to develop a POS system that uses a camera to instantly identify the kind of baked good customers have on their tray.
Check out the video below, it looks a lot more impressive than it sounds.
For employees, the system is simple: just place the bread-laden tray under the camera and the name and price of each products appears on the screen.
Products are outlined in green if they have been correctly and outlined in yellow if the system can’t quite figure out if it’s melon pan or maple melon pan. And the system does mess up, the employee can register the product by hand and the computer will “learn” the subtle differences in shape and color among products so it doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
We’ve seen something like this before and it’s just as we feared: the machines are getting smarter.
Source: YouTube