Product Identification

The task of determining what a packaged or unpackaged product is from visual (or other sensory) input, at a level of detail useful to an end user: generic type (soup, cereal, shampoo), brand (Campbell's, Kellogg's, Dove), and variety or flavour (tomato vs. chicken noodle; 90% lean vs. 93% lean ground beef). For blind and low-vision people, product identification is a core daily-living task — applied to groceries, medications, toiletries, and mail — and is the use case behind many assistive technologies: barcode scanners, RFID tags (e.g., WayAround), OCR apps, remote sighted-assistance services (Be My Eyes, Aira), and AI captioning tools (Be My AI, Seeing AI, general-purpose VLMs). Accuracy at the variety level matters because mix-ups can have dietary, allergic, or medical consequences.