# An Efficient Person Clustering Algorithm for Open Checkout-free Groceries

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.02973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02973/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [Towards Open World Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.5687/) (2014)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [The EuroCity Persons Dataset: A Novel Benchmark for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07193/) (2018)
- [Linkage Based Face Clustering via Graph Convolution Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11306/) (2019)
- [Learning to Cluster Faces on an Affinity Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02749/) (2019)
- [Distilled Siamese Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10586/) (2019)
- [SphereReID: Deep Hypersphere Manifold Embedding for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00537/) (2018)
- [Better Than Reference In Low Light Image Enhancement: Conditional Re-Enhancement Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11434/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Undiagnosed Data for Glaucoma Classification with Teacher-Student Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11355/) (2020)
- [Learning self-calibrated optic disc and cup segmentation from multi-rater annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05092/) (2022)
- [SeATrans: Learning Segmentation-Assisted diagnosis model via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05763/) (2022)
- [Universal, transferable and targeted adversarial attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11332/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CloSeR: Unified Relational Distillation from Closed-Set Teachers for Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25692/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open checkout-free grocery is the grocery store where the customers never have to wait in line to check out. Developing a system like this is not trivial since it faces challenges of recognizing the dynamic and massive flow of people. In particular, a clustering method that can efficiently assign each snapshot to the corresponding customer is essential for the system. In order to address the unique challenges in the open checkout-free grocery, we propose an efficient and effective person clustering method. Specifically, we first propose a Crowded Sub-Graph (CSG) to localize the relationship among massive and continuous data streams. CSG is constructed by the proposed Pick-Link-Weight (PLW) strategy, which picks the nodes based on time-space information, links the nodes via trajectory information, and weighs the links by the proposed von Mises-Fisher (vMF) similarity metric. Then, to ensure that the method adapts to the dynamic and unseen person flow, we propose Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) with a simple Nearest Neighbor (NN) strategy to accurately cluster the instances of CSG. GCN is adopted to project the features into low-dimensional separable space, and NN is able to quickly produce a result in this space upon dynamic person flow. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other alternative algorithms in this scenario. In practice, the whole system has been implemented and deployed in several real-world open checkout-free groceries.