• Newusername4oldfart@lemm.ee
    ·
    11 months ago

    Tracking the time the person has spent in view is a legitimate task this software can accomplish (although this was called person/object detection/tracking long before AI was the newest buzzword).

    The number of cups the baristas are making? Likely bullshit.

    • Bobby_DROP_TABLES [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Exactly, tracking time in frame is a pretty standard CV task. Tracking # cups of coffee made would be require more sophistication than any cafe in the world could afford, if it's even possible to do reliably.

      • Drug_Shareni [comrade/them, he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Purely guessing for fun:

        If it can reliably recognise workers, and every worker is only making coffee for their own customers: count how many coffees the worker entered into the POS system based on timestamps.

        • Bobby_DROP_TABLES [he/him]
          ·
          11 months ago

          Yeah that would be one way to do it without any computer vision tech. Recognizing workers might be a stretch even, that would require a model to be trained on shitloads of pictures of every single employee.

          • GaveUp [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            I think it can be pretty easily setup by the company contracting out this software with a single consultant/engineer

            You can see in the photo that there's a clear division of customers and employees separated by the counter

            So hardcode in the counter coordinates on the camera screen and any human detected to the right of the counter can automatically be assumed to be a worker and anybody left of it can be assumed to be a customer

          • Drug_Shareni [comrade/them, he/him]
            ·
            11 months ago

            From how it looks in the screenshot, every worker has a differently colored tracer following their movement. Why mess around with face recognition, when you can just pin an led badge to every worker

      • GaveUp [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        I do some applied ML on photos/videos and I feel like this should be pretty simple

        Manually map out the coordinates of the counter and add a bounding box of coffee cups/mugs in addition to your baristas. Count how many times an overlapping coffee mug and barista bounding box enters the bounding box of the counter

        • Bobby_DROP_TABLES [he/him]
          ·
          11 months ago

          I guess that would work if you structured the shop's entire workflow around being recognizable by the program. Even then, pairing this with employee recognition and considering all the edge cases it would be very hard to pull off. It would be a really cool problem to hash out if it wasn't for such a cartoonish evil application.

      • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        11 months ago

        Just think of all the resources needed to achieve this feat of human ingenuity. Only to use it to squeeze an extra .25% profit out of a barista.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Its crazy that this would be a thing AI would need to do when any half descent accountant could simply measure cups-poured by shift and sift the data for the most productive employees. Even then, the bottleneck in this shop is certainly not the staffers themselves. The work space is tiny and the equipment is antiquated. You're investing god knows how much in AI when you'd be far better off renovating.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        You could just track cups via the tills. I don't get it, none of this adds anything at all that doesn't already exist. You already produce a record of transactions per employee via receipts produced in the cash registers.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          11 months ago

          none of this adds anything at all that doesn't already exist

          The last decade of western technological advancement in a nutshell.

    • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      ·
      11 months ago

      The tracking doesn't even matter, the number of cups is not even a useful statistic. Why would anyone want to track that?

      I assume the 5 or so people behind the counter have their own responsibilities and work as a team instead of competing to serve the most cups.

    • mayo_cider [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      99% of applications for neural networks are just replacing sensors and measurement systems with a crude approximation implemented using image recognition that works (at best) only in the ideal demo scenario they present to investors/clients

      A friend of mine worked for a company that was trying to sell a warning system for unfastened seatbelts using a webcam in the console