Inventory management system for a refrigerator appliance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional refrigerator appliances require significant user interaction and computationally intensive image analysis to monitor food items, often leading to inaccuracies and resource wastage in inventory management.
Innovation Solution
A refrigerator appliance equipped with a camera assembly and a controller that obtains raw images, identifies an anchor object, crops the image to generate a reduced image, and analyzes it to detect food items being added or removed, minimizing computational resources through efficient image processing techniques like R-CNN and image segmentation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Difficulty of detecting and measuring
If conventional image analysis is used to monitor food items, then food item detection capability is provided, but computational resource consumption increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the image processing task into two stages: first identifying anchor objects (food items) in the full image, then performing detailed analysis only on cropped regions surrounding these anchor objects. This segmentation approach enables food item detection while significantly reducing the computational load by limiting intensive processing to small localized areas rather than the entire image.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and processes only the relevant portions of the image by cropping regions around identified anchor objects. This extraction principle removes unnecessary computational processing of background and irrelevant areas, thereby reducing overall computational resource consumption while maintaining effective food item monitoring capability.
2Device complexity
If user interaction is required for inventory monitoring, then system simplicity is maintained, but ease of operation decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The system automatically captures images, identifies anchor objects, crops relevant regions, and detects food items without requiring user input or interaction. The refrigerator appliance autonomously performs the entire inventory monitoring process, eliminating the need for users to manually input food item information while maintaining relatively simple system architecture.
Data Source
AI summary
A refrigerator appliance is provided including a cabinet defining a chilled chamber, a door rotatably hinged to the cabinet to provide selective access to the chilled chamber, and a camera assembly mounted to the cabinet for monitoring the chilled chamber. A controller is operably coupled to the camera assembly and is configured to obtain a raw image using the camera assembly, analyze the raw image to identify an anchor object, crop the raw image to generate a reduced image surrounding the anchor object, and analyze the reduced image to identify a food item being added to or removed from the chilled chamber.