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Smart Self-Service Scales
Roland Piquepaille writes "German researchers have developed intelligent self-service scales for supermarkets, able to recognize fruit or vegetables placed on them (photo). The scales automatically recognize the item being weighed and ask the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant, such as various kinds of tomatoes. The scales are equipped with a camera and an image evaluation algorithm that compares the image of the item on the scale with images stored in its database. Store managers can add items to the database. The scales are now being tested in about 300 supermarkets across Europe."
It would be more useful the other way round: if I told it they were tomatoes at it could figure out exactly what type they were.
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I quite enjoyed the apparent abolition of self-service scales in favor of weighing fruits at checkout. Let's hope they don't make a comeback.
Fleur de Sel
I for one welcome our new intelligent self-service weighing overlords
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
Welcome our new, intelligent, self-service checkout scale overlords...
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
I understand that people want to avoid long lines at the grocery store. They all pile into the self-serve line because they can of course check out their own groceries faster than some retarded minimum-wage monkey girl and her patchouli-scented pet bagboy can.
It's a little like wanting to drive your own car instead of taking the bus or train. The feeling that you are in control makes you feel like you can move faster, but the fact of the matter is that you're simply clogging up the road with your lousy driving skills and 4 ton 2mpg piece of American shit SUV. You make yourself and everyone else slower just by being on the road.
I haven't been to Germany, but I've been to Austria and found that, aside from grocery stores closing at 3:30 in the afternoon, that you had to weigh and tag your own fruits. The retarded minimum-wage monkey girl just stared at me like I was from Mars when I passed her a bunch of bananas with no price sticker on it. Then she ate the fucking things.
So anyway, the experience of doing it yourself is highly overrated. I think Arsenio Hall said it best, "Oh give me the dick, Eddie!" But he also said something like the "wiping your own butt is overrated" or something in that movie about African dudes who came to Manhattan to work at McDonalds.
Except that the linked picture shows strawberries on the scales, but the screen shows a choice of all kinds of other fruit and veg, not different kinds of strawberry.
This is just plain silly and useless. If you fail to see why, I am sad for you. Cool software/hardware has its place, but this will just cost consumers more for no gain whatsoever.
Which is better for me as a customer, having someone in checkout that just grabs my tomatoes and enters the price, bags them, or, a stupid robot that makes me do everything. This technology doesn't benefit me at all, it benefits the store. I refuse to use it.
This is my sig.
where is the camera?
We should get a discount for doing all the work and saving them a salary or two. Of course we pump our own gas now and it is just a matter of time until they turn it around and start charging a premium to scan and bag.
I don't know how widespread these are outside the UK, but ever used one of the self-service checkouts that are appearing? Scan item, bag it, scan next item etc...
Great idea. Except that the whole point is to save time, and these things were clearly never tested by someone in a hurry because it's trivially easy to scan and bag faster than the checkout can keep up. Well, it would be except the damn thing refuses to scan item 2 until item 1 has been bagged and it takes forever to register that item 1 has been bagged.
They're only faster if the supermarket is full of technophobic customers and the checkouts have a queue going out the door.
Just a few days ago when I was shopping with my family at a "real" store (maybe comparable to WalMart in the US) in Potsdam (near Berlin), I was confronted with this kind of scale. The scale looks similar to the standard self service scales, but it sports a touch screen instead of the panel with selection buttons. The camera is also included in the touch sceen.
After I had placed a clear bag with nectarines on the scale it displayed a number of selections that it considered the appropriate type of fruit. None of the selections came even close, so I had to select "nectarines" manually on the touch sceen.
Generally this is a nice idea, but it just does not seem to work, maybe also because we always place the fuits in bags before putting them on the scale.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Half the time, self-checkout scales are badly calibrated. To exacerbate this issue, about half the people who use them don't realize they operate on product weight.
This leads to accusations of theft when people lean on the wrong portion of the machine, or simply out of nowhere because the AC kicked in blowing onto the scale.
Adding yet more application of the scale's reading toward functionality will create even more glitches in this regard.
Additionally, the self checkouts in my area are used at nazi-mart, where half the inventory requires a card not by law, but because the waltons are invasive (explatives deleted)
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We have stopped making things, and now increased automation is rendering the service industry pointless. To be honest, like most of the public, I would rather deal with a machine than another human being, if only because that other human being is inevitably some slack-jawed sack of cynicism and self-loathing who hates their job and thus a large percentage of their existence.
The economy of western Europe, therefore, is developing into one based entirely on producing reality TV shows and suing people for sharing them on the Internet. Hooray.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
it's based on photo scanning now..
we all know image recognition is so much more advanced than weight sensitivity.
a little smear on the scanner (all the scanners ive seen even on the human operated machines are filthy) and it's mistaking apples for oranges, oranges for grapefruits, and pineapples for watermelons.
I stand by my analysis though, and predict utter failure if implemented.
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When I read the headline I interpreted it as a scale that can repair itself when it breaks.
But then again, that's why I'm an anonymous coward.
My girlfriend unwittingly leaned across one of these scales to reach a bag of apples, whereupon the screen started showing pictures of different kinds of melons. Fairly accurate, I'd say.
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
My girlfriend unwittingly leaned across one of these scales to reach a bag of apples, whereupon the screen started showing pictures of different kinds of melons
... You never removed the bar code from your inflatable life partner? :\
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
My usual lunchtime shop has trouble reading BARCODES on half the stuff I buy. Swipe, nothing, swipe, nothing, swipe, nothing... Type in tiny number, beep. Yeah, that's time saving. And now I'm being told computers can tell the difference between tangerines and satsumas? Heck, I can't even do that!
I call shenanigans. Either:
* each vegetable has a secret RFID chip in it
or
* the picture is sent to some outsourced call centre where someone sits at a screen watching vegetables all day and clicking on what they are.
So the scale can send your picture and ID to the FBI for large scale vegetable fraud and conspiracy to fruit theft when your puny human brain can't decide whether the apple on the picture is slightly larger or less reddish than the one you are actually trying to pay for.
I refuse to use self-service checkouts. They have installed two of them in the local Tesco (occupies the position that Wal-Mart does in the UK market).
Every time I go in, a clipboard-wielding junior manager tries to make me use them. I usually just say "No", but next time I've resolved to explain why.
Completely aside from the fact that the implementation is dreadful, the things are designed to do people out of a job, in a town that sorely needs jobs. Two of these things are typically supervised by one worker, instead of requiring two people to man two manual ones. You only spend on capital if you have an expectation of increased quality or reduced labour costs, and I can't see these things increasing quality.
People who work grocery retail are at the bottom end of the labour market, so where are they going to go? I don't feel comfortable helping the the likes of Tesco line their pockets like this. I'm starting to feel close to the line where I stop shopping there (if only they hadn't managed to crowd out all the local greengrocers and fishmongers, which I suppose is partially my fault).
Self service discount? Over here we call it shoplifting :).
We have so many plants out there that common people just call them weeds because it'd be too hard to learn names for everything. If you had a hand held device that told you what type of plant you're looking at, you could have names for everything. There is a lot of potential for things like this.
God spoke to me.
Look kids, its Roland Piquepaille!
We don't produce any of those things; we produce the plans for such things. Physical manufacture is largely done elsewhere.
Wrong yourself. You better tell my customers that they don't produce those products themselves right here in high-cost Northern Europe. You are making political "points" ignoring the truth or you are simply oblivious to it!
rather than smart computer.
I'd rather have the scale suggest to me (and me confirming or choosing something else) the type of fruit/veg rather than telling me.
As I can quite clearly envision the scenario where scale is wrong (tangerine, kumquat, etc.) and I have to track down some scarce-in-supply worker to actually override the scale (or just accept that it is wrong and deal with what ever that means in price).
It is much more suited for computerised decision support than computerised recognition. It would probably be right in the majority of cases (the easy ones) and when it comes to the difficult ones, the customer usually knows what (s)he is buying anyway...
What is involved in having every item of food tagged so that you simply bundle it all in bags and then as you go through the checkout it adds it all up and gives a total to the checkout monkey? I know fruit and veg might be difficult, but I've always thought that handling every single item and pushing it past a laser if very inefficient. I thought we were living in an age of technlology? Where is super cheap mass RFID at the moment?
Or, they could just put a bar code on the fruit stickers... nah, that's too easy.
stuff |
This is Slashdot. We don't care if the checkout line is sentient. What we really want to know is..
Does it run Linux?
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This is just another move towards getting rid of cashiers and making the customer check their own goods. This trend has been increasing in the last the year or two. Now there are more self serve checkouts at Home Depot, Lowe's, Sam's and other stores.
Eventually they will have huge warehouses where the customers never see a live person that works there. Combined with ATMs and fast food drive up windows a person would not have to talk to anyone at all.
Some how I don't think this is an improvement. How can a self checkout improve the customer experience? And just imagine the backups when that item you picked up does not have the barcode on it. Who is going to help then?
I quite enjoy the self service scanners in Tesco, it enables me to rid myself of all my small change on a much more regualr basis, have you ever tried counting out small change at the till while the check out girl sits there with her hand out tutting and looking at the other customers who all then beginn sighing and tutting themselves? It's a nightmare, you would think anything less than a pound/euro isn't real money anymore. On one occasion (not in tesco) while on holiday and trying to rid ourselves of the foreign currency my girlfriend handed over a fist of change and the shop girl actually tutted and held out the money for her fellow till monkey to see! If this is the sort of people we no longer have to deal with then i say roll on self service!
This would be good in the capacity of a suggestion type thing, like predictive text on your cell phone, but I think it would be wrong far too often to actually narrow your choices. I mean, there are produce items in the grocery that I can't tell apart myself, like most of the green, leafy products, and they are going to write a program to do it? I can't imagine a computer could reliably tell the difference in lettuce and cabbage just by looks, but maybe if Clippy popped in and said, "I think you want to buy a head of lettuce, is that right?"
This would be trivial with RFID stickers. Oh, but I forgot, the paranoid idiots out there are afraid of technology.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
In a supermarket nearby I have found some of these new self service scales.
It takes between 5 and 10 seconds to get a result. And it is more like a lucky guess. In half of the cases the scale cannot identify anything and I have to use the touchscreen. In 30 to 40 percent of cases the computer gives me a choice of three or four vegetables.
Better yet, we use the data for a new CAPTCHA system. "To enter this website, please type the name of the fruit or vegetable in the following photo."
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Honestly, I find self-service checkouts pretty annoying. I don't *want* to scan my own crap. I'll bag it, but scanning it myself is a hassle, and it doesn't save time because I can unload while the cashier is scanning, which means two things getting done at once.
I have resisted using the self checkouts for the sake of speed, and because I think the cashiers provide a service that is worth paying for.
I've had enough of companies cutting thier costs by pushing the work onto their customers. ATMs are OK because they add convience. Self-checkout is NOT OK because it will slow down checkout.
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[Rajesh's phone rings]
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The problem with self-service scales in the supermarkets I've been to is not that it's hard to enter the item, it's that frequently _the item isn't in the database_. Or the PLU sticker is missing from the item or the shelf tag... and can't be looked up because it demands an exact name match and you don't know whether a sweet Vidalia onion begins with O or V or S.
The premise that it can recognize produce visually is unlikely to say the least. Do you really think it can tell the difference between bananas at $0.69 a pound and organically grown bananas at $1.19 a pound? How about a Fuji apple and a Gala apple?
I'm willing to bet that the system does more to impede legitimate purchases than to facilitate them.
I'm bet that "ask[ing] the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant" sounds like a smokescreen and a pretext. I'll be these scales really being sold to control-freak store managers who fear that customers are building a better retirement by ringing up expensive orange peppers as cheap green peppers, and is willing to spend $50,000 to prevent a couple of customers a day from bilking the store of $2.67.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I wonder how many liberals do self service checkout? Can we get a poll of Obama supporters that do the self service checkout, and in doing so undercut all the -union- labor that works in the supermarkets? If you want to support the Dems, and organized labor, then, you need to support things that support labor and so if a store is backed up because they've got one person doing checkout, then you need to embarrass that store into action. And it helps too, if you pull up to the store in a car built in the USA by union workers. Sure, voting Dem to wash your hands of your own buying decisions might be one way to improve labor, but, I think this Republican that always buys American and waits in the line behind the human checkout does more for labor in the long run... because at least I pay for it.
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Just as long as it doesn't ask me 'Does this make me look fat?'
hehe. I bet Seattle will think twice before investing in this.
u-bend
Because people can't stop touching, sqeezing, pressing and fumbling all the fruit and vegetables which lets them get bad much faster.
The exception is the super-expensive fruits that the general public don't touch because they're too expensive.
When I had a greengrocer next to where I lived, I would always buy the stuff there - only the staff was allowed to touch the fruit and as a result, it lasted much longer than anything available elsewhere - even though it was more ripe than usual supermarket-fruit.
I really hate self-service - but mostly because of the other people who can't behave and pretend they are the last shoppers on earth.
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Do you really think it can tell the difference between bananas at $0.69 a pound and organically grown bananas at $1.19 a pound? How about a Fuji apple and a Gala apple?
In either of these cases it will pop up a set of pictures for the customer to select from.
This is not intended to prevent fraud, but to help the customer who can't recall whether the PLU was 637263 or 631263.
I would assume that other retailers do this as well, but they just have a different standard. Walmart seems to expect a line length of 3 to 7. Late at night when fewer people shop, they seem to have less staff and the lines are still 3 to 7 long. I would assume that their level of service was the same before the self service registers were added. I really can't imagining the lines were any worse before.
Can it differentiate between organic and regular produce ? If it doesn't and asks the customer, then good, organic produce will become cheaper.
Yeah, I got some "fruit" for it to try and recognize.
Scanner: "*ding* Tea bags."
Wow! It *is* good!
I have a better idea. How about you go to the checkout stand and let someone else ring up the items. After all, if the store wants my money, they can put a real human there to collect it from me, to answer questions, etc. I can't stand the fact that I have to do all the work of ringing up my items on those automatic machines that say, "Please put the item back in the bag" when I never removed it in the first place. Or, better yet, if they want me to ring up my own stuff, there better be a 10% discount on my entire purchase, because if I'm doing all the work to save them the money of paying a cashier, then I want to save some money too.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
In fact the trend has just started to change again, the transportation prices are rising making it increasingly profitable to produce closer to home.
Just the other day I read an article from the UK about companies moving manufacturing home from China. And don't forget that the same thing is happening in the US [in some areas].
And China is experiencing problems with higher labor costs following a real lack of available manpower. People in China are getting picky about what jobs they take and the wages they get.
I can say almost nobody likes self-check machines. I work for a grocery store an I refuse to use them if I have more than a couple items. Customers can't explain or reason with them. Stores have to devote an experienced cashier to monitor them. Funny thing is though, a halfway decent cashier can process as many items per minute as three self-check machines. A really good cashier can compete with four or five. If you are losing a cashier to babysit the machines, the store isn't scanning any faster in terms of items per minute. In fact, the store is definitely losing valuable customer interaction and, possibly, efficiency. That is, unless, you have six or more self-checks. In that case, you are a Walmart, and you don't care about customer interaction or service, just price and volume. But that's a whole different rant.
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Tonight I saw somewhat local tomatoes for USD 0.75 equivalent per kg. They were ugly, but looked like what I would have grown myself. If I had picked at eye level, I would have gotten Dutch imported ones that look absolutely perfect, but cost $8.55/kg.
They are both red and round, but the expensive ones are a little bigger. Maybe this is why the EU has standards where perfectly good fruit is destroyed because it was a few mm to small or a banana wasn't bent enough. It has to meet an OCR standard. Otherwise, it is like trying to implement OCR for documents from people with bad handwriting.
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
Not quite. I usually shop almost daily, and get 12 items or less, and get out through the line before the guy next to me is done fumbling with the self service machine.
Nice try though.
Funny thing but I encountered such scale in Poland, Szczecin city, but not sure which supermarket. I was watching it closely and it was dectecting food properly most of the time. Cool stuff, which makes shopping more fun :).
I don't work for free. Would you?
Self serve checkouts don't eliminate a job, they eliminate the cost of getting the job done.
When I'm asked by a manager if I wouldn't like to get out of line and use a self serve checkout terminal, I tell them I'll gladly do it, but only for some sort of a discount. I've had this conversation several times, and they all got perplexed in a "we never looked at it that way before" look on their face.
Sure you didn't...
The photos hows strawberries, and the machine suggests all kinds of fruit that have "red" in them.
Sure it's an improvement over the old system, where you always had to chose from 70 or so choices, but it's not that it only doesn't know the difference between roma tomatoes, and regular ones.
This is your argument: people who didn't try hard at school shouldn't be allowed to have menial jobs becuase my mates who did work hard at school are struggling to find emplyment. Mate, you're a dick. Your mates struggling to find work has absolutley nothing to do with "layabouts" working in supermarkets unless for some reason your mates had their eyes on the lucrative career that is checkout-drone at the local supermarket and were pipped by people you don't like. I don't think you're a fascist, I think you're a dick. In the small (UK) town where I used to live the counters at the supermarkets were staffed by middle-aged and "retired" folks who needed a little bit of extra income. If you introduce automation they lose their jobs. Why is that a good thing?
The local are mall "HUMA" in St.Augustin uses them for some time, and I am not impressed, to say the least.
Out of curiosity (and because I was shopping), I tried different vegetables and fruits, and about 80% of the time the scale presents a random guess from its database instead of showing that it recognised the item.
I do not expect that it can tell one kind of apple from the other or that it knows the difference between an organic and el-cheapo tomato. But more often than not it even fails to differenciate between basically round and basically long objects (i.e. it took a lime for a cucumber, or presented me everything but potatos for the potato I put under the camera).
And as soon as the fruit or vegetable is inside one of those (transparent) bags they provide, the recognition rate goes terminally downhill. The same problem arises if you put several of one item on the scales (i.e. a handful of potatos). And no, I'm not going to weight and pay my potatos individually ;-)
The only positive aspect is that the menu to manually select the item to weigh is up-to-date. In a tree-like structure, you can choose "fruit or vegetable" (with apples and bananas as extra toplevel items, them being the top selections) and travel down the tree until you reach "Apple, Organic, Granny Smith". The downside is that you need this menu most of the time.