  Assistive solutions for a better shopping experience can improve the quality
of life of people, in particular also of visually impaired shoppers. We present
a system that visually recognizes the fine-grained product classes of items on
a shopping list, in shelves images taken with a smartphone in a grocery store.
Our system consists of three components: (a) We automatically recognize useful
text on product packaging, e.g., product name and brand, and build a mapping of
words to product classes based on the large-scale GroceryProducts dataset. When
the user populates the shopping list, we automatically infer the product class
of each entered word. (b) We perform fine-grained product class recognition
when the user is facing a shelf. We discover discriminative patches on product
packaging to differentiate between visually similar product classes and to
increase the robustness against continuous changes in product design. (c) We
continuously improve the recognition accuracy through active learning. Our
experiments show the robustness of the proposed method against cross-domain
challenges, and the scalability to an increasing number of products with
minimal re-training.
