Edge AI – Realtime Item-Scan for iOS and Web

The MERCARI GEARS Lecture Series is a video series for engineers that features the future direction and technical challenges of each Mercari Group company, including Mercari Inc.

In this edition of MERCARI GEARS, Mercari's Edge AI Team highlights the Mercari app’s real-time item scanning feature, available on iOS and Web.

Edge AI - Realtime Item Scan for iOS and Web [AI@Mercari]

Mercari has a feature called "AI Listing" that suggests category, brand, and even selling price for an item when you upload a photo of it.

To use the "AI Listing" feature, you used to have to take and upload a photo of an item. But now, the Edge AI Team has made it possible to to use the feature as soon as your device’s camera is activated and the item is in focus.

In order to create a quicker and more comfortable display experience, the team leveraged recent advances in smartphone technology to create an ML model with low computational cost. As a result, suggestions through this feature can now be made directly on the smartphone without having to go back and forth to a computer server.

We are working on a variety of things, including improving processing time and device compatibility to adapt quantization to the learning model and make inferences, developing tools to monitor performance after implementation, which are explained in detail in the video. Please take a look!