System and Method for Locating, Identifying and Counting Items

A system for building a product classifier, comprising:

• an image capture unit;
• a shelf label detector and reader to capture shelf label data;
• a processing module to define multiple bounding boxes, and
• a trainable image classifier to associate images within the bounding boxes with the shelf label data, the images being provided by the image capture unit.

A inventory monitoring method, comprising the steps of:

• detecting and reading shelf labels;
• detecting distance from at least one camera to at least one shelf;
• defining bounding boxes around potential inventory in an image taken with at least one camera;
• and
• associating selected bounding boxes in the image to selected shelf labels to build at least one of a product classifier or a product library.