One-Shot Learning from Prototype Stock Keeping Unit Images

This paper highlights the importance of one-shot learning from prototype Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) images for efficient product recognition in retail and inventory management. Traditional methods require large supervised datasets to train deep neural networks, which can be costly and impractical. One-shot learning techniques mitigate this issue by enabling classification from a single prototype image per product class, thus reducing data annotation efforts. We introduce the Variational Prototyping Encoder (VPE), a novel deep neural network for one-shot classification. Utilizing a support set of prototype SKU images, VPE learns to classify query images by capturing image similarity and prototypical concepts. Unlike metric learning-based approaches, VPE pre-learns image translation from real-world object images to prototype images as a meta-task, facilitating efficient one-shot classification with minimal supervision. Our research demonstrates that VPE effectively reduces the need for extensive datasets by utilizing a single image per class while accurately classifying query images into their respective categories, thus providing a practical solution for product classification tasks.