Concept-based Anomaly Detection in Retail Stores for Automatic
  Correction using Mobile Robots
Aditya Kapoor Vartika Sengar Nijil George Vighnesh Vatsal Jayavardhana Gubbi Balamuralidhar P Arpan Pal
Tracking of inventory and rearrangement of misplaced items are some of the
most labor-intensive tasks in a retail environment. While there have been
attempts at using vision-based techniques for these tasks, they mostly use
planogram compliance for detection of any anomalies, a technique that has been
found lacking in robustness and scalability. Moreover, existing systems rely on
human intervention to perform corrective actions after detection. In this
paper, we present Co-AD, a Concept-based Anomaly Detection approach using a
Vision Transformer (ViT) that is able to flag misplaced objects without using a
prior knowledge base such as a planogram. It uses an auto-encoder architecture
followed by outlier detection in the latent space. Co-AD has a peak success
rate of 89.90% on anomaly detection image sets of retail objects drawn from the
RP2K dataset, compared to 80.81% on the best-performing baseline of a standard
ViT auto-encoder. To demonstrate its utility, we describe a robotic mobile
manipulation pipeline to autonomously correct the anomalies flagged by Co-AD.
This work is ultimately aimed towards developing autonomous mobile robot
solutions that reduce the need for human intervention in retail store
management.