HK1242022A - Method and apparatus for determining order information - Google Patents

Description

Order information determining method and device

Technical Field

The present disclosure relates to the field of internet technologies, and in particular, to a method and an apparatus for determining order information.

Background

After a consumer selects a commodity in a traditional physical store, the consumer needs to queue for payment at a checkout counter, and payment staff assists in carrying out payment by using a computer, but the payment process is often inefficient and likely takes a long waiting time. In order to improve the checkout efficiency, in the prior art, when a consumer purchases a commodity, the purchasing process of the consumer can be analyzed in real time based on technologies such as computer vision and the like, which commodities the consumer takes are judged, which commodities are put back are judged, and order information, namely a bill list of the consumer is modified and determined. However, there are many factors in the above analysis process that may cause inaccurate judgment, for example, a consumer may mistakenly return a product with a very high similarity to a wrong position, or a recognition device may be blocked when multiple people simultaneously take a product on a lower shelf to cause erroneous judgment, and these factors may cause inaccurate order information determination and affect product settlement.

Disclosure of Invention

In view of the above, the present disclosure provides an order information determining method and apparatus, so as to determine order information of a commodity more quickly and accurately, so that the commodity on an order is associated with a consumer.

Specifically, the present disclosure is realized by the following technical solutions:

in a first aspect, an order information determining method is provided, which is used for determining an association between a user and a commodity selected for purchase, and the method includes:

acquiring a container identifier of a commodity container, wherein the container identifier corresponds to a user identifier of the user, and the commodity container is used for loading commodities purchased by the user;

determining the distance between the commodity and the commodity container according to the position information obtained by positioning the commodity and the commodity container;

and if the distance is within a preset range, adding the commodity information of the commodity into an order, wherein the order is the order of the user identifier corresponding to the container identifier.

In a second aspect, an order information determination apparatus is provided, the apparatus comprising:

the container determining module is used for acquiring a container identifier of a commodity container, wherein the container identifier corresponds to the user identifier of the user, and the commodity container is used for loading commodities purchased by the user;

the distance determining module is used for determining the distance between the commodity and the commodity container according to the position information obtained by positioning the commodity and the commodity container;

and the order processing module is used for adding the commodity information of the commodity into an order if the distance is within a preset range, wherein the order is an order of the user identifier corresponding to the container identifier.

The order information determining method and the order information determining device can rapidly and accurately determine the order information of the consumer, automatically complete settlement and payment of the order, enable the consumer to leave directly after shopping is completed, avoid queuing and settlement at a cashier desk, improve shopping efficiency and have good shopping experience.

Drawings

FIG. 1 is a regional layout of a convenience store provided by an embodiment of the present disclosure;

FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of a detailed layout within a convenience store provided by an embodiment of the present disclosure;

FIG. 3 is a schematic structural diagram of a computing device provided by an embodiment of the present disclosure;

FIG. 4 is a flow chart of an order information determination provided by the disclosed embodiment;

FIG. 5 is a flow chart of an order information determination provided by embodiments of the present disclosure;

fig. 6 is a schematic structural diagram of an order information determining apparatus according to an embodiment of the present disclosure.

Detailed Description

In daily life, people often go to places such as supermarkets, shopping malls, convenience stores and the like to shop, and the shopping behavior is frequently carried out. After the purchase of the goods is completed, the consumer goes to the checkout counter at the exit and checks out in line, which is time-consuming and inconvenient. In order to improve Shopping efficiency, a Shopping management system (Shopping management system) can be used for automatically identifying which commodities a certain consumer purchases in the Shopping process, determining the association relationship between the consumer and the purchased commodities, automatically pushing the corresponding bill to the consumer, and enabling the consumer to pay by self, so that the consumer does not need to queue and settle accounts at an outlet, and Shopping efficiency is obviously improved.

An important factor for realizing the method is that the incidence relation between the consumer and the selected commodity is determined, and the bill corresponding to the consumer can be obtained only after the incidence relation is determined. The association relationship can be referred to as order information, namely, which commodities a certain consumer chooses to purchase, and the order information determining method provided by the disclosure aims to simply and accurately determine the order information so as to assist quick settlement.

The processing procedure of the order information determining method of the present disclosure will be described below by taking an example of a consumer shopping in a convenience store, but the method may be applied to other scenarios as well, such as supermarket shopping, shopping in a shopping mall, inventory monitoring of a warehouse (which people take inventory of the warehouse), book management of a library (which books a user borrows), and the like, where the association relationship between a person and an article needs to be determined.

Fig. 1 illustrates a layout of a convenience store area, and as shown in fig. 1, the convenience store 100 can include an entrance area 101, a storage area 102, and an exit area 103. A consumer may enter the convenience store 100 through the entrance area 101 and make a purchase of goods in the storage area 102, and exit the convenience store through the exit area 103 after the purchase is completed. In which many goods may be stored in the storage area 102, for example, 1021 to 1024 illustrated in fig. 1 are goods in convenience stores, which may include fruits, beverages, milk, bread, etc., and fig. 1 illustrates only a part of the goods, and more goods may be included in the actual storage area 102. The layout of the convenience store shown in fig. 1 is a functional division of areas and not an actual physical division of areas. For example, in one example, there may be a plurality of entrance zones 101, storage zones 102, and exit zones 103 merged together rather than separate independent layouts.

The convenience store 100 of FIG. 1 may also include a shopping management system 104, and the shopping management system 104 may communicatively interact with the above-described entry area 101, storage area 102, and exit area 103. Continuing to refer to FIG. 2, FIG. 2 illustrates in more detail the layout within a convenience store. For example, shopping carts 201 may be placed in the store 100 at the entrance area 101, and the consumer 202 may push one cart 201 to load the selected merchandise when entering the store, although in other examples, the cart 201 may be replaced by a shopping basket, shopping bag, or other container. In the storage area 102, a number of shelves 203 may be placed, on which shelves 203 a number of goods may be placed, such as bananas 2031, milk 2031, etc. as illustrated in fig. 2. The consumer can place his or her own selected merchandise in the shopping cart 201. After shopping is completed, the consumer can go to the exit area of the convenience store, push the shopping cart 201 to go out of the convenience store through the exit passage 204, and one exit passage 204 generally only allows one person to push the shopping cart to pass through in sequence without waiting in line.

In one example, the present disclosure may attach an RFID (radio frequency Identification) tag to each shopping cart and to each item, such as RFID tag 205 attached to the shopping cart and RFID tag 206 attached to the items on shelf 203 in fig. 2. The labels on the shopping carts are different, the labels respectively comprise identification information of the shopping carts, similarly, the labels on different commodities comprise different information, and the labels comprise identification information of corresponding commodities.

As shown in fig. 2, a plurality of readers for receiving RFID tag signals, for example, a reader 207 provided in an entrance area, a reader 208 provided in a storage area, and a reader 209 provided in an exit area, may be installed in a wall, a roof, or the like in the convenience store. The reader may communicate the received information of the RFID tag to shopping management system 104, which shopping management system 104 may store and process the information. In addition, monitoring devices such as cameras 210 may be provided in the convenience store, and these monitoring devices may be used to perform video monitoring of the store, and the monitoring information may also be transmitted to the shopping management system 104. The shopping management system 104 may also transmit information in the system to other devices for display through a network device installed in the store, such as a wireless antenna, for example, may transmit the information to a smart phone carried by the consumer, so that the consumer may conveniently view the information acquired by the shopping management system from above the smart phone.

Shopping management system 104 may be a local or remote server system that may include a large number of computing processing devices, for example, two computing devices are illustrated in FIG. 2, and a larger number may be practical. As shown in fig. 3, one computing device may include a processor 301, an input output interface 302, a network interface 303, and a memory 304. The processor 301, the input/output interface 302, the network interface 303, and the memory 304 may be connected via a bus 305 and communicate with each other. FIG. 3 illustrates only some of the components, and an actual computing device may include more or fewer components. The memory 304 may further include a data management module 3041 and a shopping management module 3042, which may be in the form of hardware, software, or the like, and when it is in the form of software, it may be a computer executable program.

For example, the computing device may receive information transmitted by devices such as RFID tags, cameras, etc. in a convenience store via the network interface 303 and process the information (details will be given later in the examples), such as location information of shopping carts or merchandise via the RFID tags, or member ID information transmitted by consumers, etc. The processor 301 may process the received information by executing the instruction of the shopping management module 3042 to obtain some latest data, such as information of a consumer who newly enters a convenience store, location information of a product, location information of a shopping cart, or order information of the consumer; also, the processor 301 may update these data into the database 305 by executing instructions of the data management module 3041.

In one example, database 305 may store data, which may include, for example, user information, location information, and order information; the user information may be some member IDs of registered users of the shopping management system, the location information may be information obtained by locating commodities and shopping carts as described in the following examples, and the order information may be which commodities are selected by the consumer. Moreover, the computing device may update the information according to the latest received data, for example, the user information may be updated when there is a new registered user, the location information of the goods may be updated in real-time positioning of the goods, and the order information may be updated according to a change of the goods in the order. In addition, the computing device may output data in the database, for example, order information may be fetched from the database and sent to other devices, such as a mobile phone of the consumer, so that the consumer may view the information.

FIG. 4 illustrates a process for order information determination, wherein when a consumer enters a convenience store to shop for an item, the consumer may push a cart in the entrance area, place the item on the shelf in the cart during the shopping process, and push the cart out of the convenience store directly in the exit area after the shop has been completed. In this process, the shopping management system may execute the process of FIG. 4 to complete the determination of order information, i.e., to determine which items in the convenience store were selected by the consumer.

When a consumer enters a convenience store to shop for goods, the consumer can push a shopping cart from an entrance area, the shopping cart can be pasted with a two-dimensional code and an RFID tag, wherein the two-dimensional code comprises an identifier of the shopping cart, and different shopping carts have different identifiers. In this example, the shopping cart is used to load the goods, and in the specific implementation, the goods container for loading the goods selected by the user is not necessarily the shopping cart, and may be a shopping basket, or the like. The two-dimensional code affixed to the merchandise container may contain a container identifier for identifying the container, such as a shopping basket identifier.

In step 401, for example, the user may scan the two-dimensional code on the shopping cart through shopping software installed on his smartphone, which may be a client of the shopping management system, and the user has logged in a member ID registered on the client on the smartphone, which may be referred to as a user ID. When the user scans the two-dimensional code through the client, the member ID can be bound with the identification of the shopping cart. The client may also upload the obtained shopping cart identifier to the shopping management system, and the shopping management system may receive the binding information between the member ID and the shopping cart identifier, which is equivalent to knowing which shopping cart the user uses, and may store the correspondence in the database 305.

The user pushes the shopping cart to enter the storage area for shopping, and the RFID readers 208 and the like installed in the store can be used for positioning the shopping cart and the RFID tags attached to the commodities in the whole convenience store. For example, the reader 208 may receive a tag signal transmitted by an RFID tag on an article and article container, where the tag signal may include article information and a container identifier, e.g., the article information may include an article code uniquely identifying the article. In step 402, the reader 208 may transmit the tag signal to a shopping management system, and the shopping management system may perform positioning calculation according to the tag signal to obtain location information of a positioning tag on the article and a positioning tag on an article container. For example, as seen in fig. 3, processor 301 on the computing device may execute executable code in shopping management module 3042, perform positioning calculation according to the tag signal, and store the calculated location information in database 305 by executing executable code in data management module 3041. This step can be performed according to the usual RFID location technology.

In step 403, the shopping management system may calculate a distance between the locator tag on the item and the locator tag on the item container based on the location information. The distance between these two tags corresponds to the distance between the goods and the shopping cart. The shopping management system may set a predetermined range w of a distance, where d >0 and w is a distance section, and determine whether the distance between the two tags is within the predetermined range. In step 404, if the distance is within the predetermined range, the commodity information of the commodity may be added to an order, where the order is an order of the user identifier corresponding to the container identifier, that is, the commodity is added to the order of the user, indicating that the user has purchased the commodity, and the commodity is placed in a shopping cart. If the distance is not within the predetermined range, the item is not added to the order and the user does not shop for the item.

The order information is determined by positioning the commodities and the shopping carts and determining the order attribution relation of the commodities according to the position relation, so that the order is more accurate to determine, for example, even if a plurality of people take the commodities on the goods shelf at the same time, the position relation of the commodities and each shopping cart needs to be judged, and the order attribution is determined only when the distance is close to the preset range; for another example, even if the user returns a product with a high degree of similarity to a wrong position, this does not affect the determination of the positional relationship between the final product and the shopping cart. The method is not influenced by a plurality of misleading factors, and is more accurate in judging the order attribution of the commodity.

The above-mentioned process of determining the commodity order attribution according to the judgment of the distance between the commodity and the shopping cart can be performed at any time after the user enters the convenience store, or, in other words, after the user scans the two-dimensional code on the shopping cart by using the shopping software on the smart phone, the shopping management system can start to position the RFID tag on the shopping cart, and the positioning of all the commodities in the convenience store can be monitored in real time all the time.

In one example, FIG. 5 illustrates a flow of order information determination. As shown in fig. 5, in step 501, after scanning the two-dimensional code on the shopping cart, the user pushes the shopping cart to start shopping in the convenience store. At this time, the shopping management system already obtains the container identifier corresponding to the user identifier, and knows which shopping cart the user uses to load the shopping cart. In step 502, when a user purchases goods in a storage area of the goods, the shopping management system always locates the shopping cart of the user and the goods of the convenience store, and adds the goods information of the goods to the order of the user when the distance is within a predetermined range w according to the distance between the goods and the goods container.

When the shopping management system adds the commodity to the order of the user, the data of the order information in the database 305 may be updated, that is, the commodity selected for purchase in the order of the user is updated. In addition, the shopping management system may also send order information to the smart phone of the user, as shown in fig. 3, the client installed on the smart phone of the user may have a shopping cart information interface, in which a commodity order information list may be displayed, and the user may see the following information: "you buy the following: banana and apple' to enable the user to know the change of the order at any time, and the quantity of the commodities selected by the user can be displayed, or other more commodity information can be displayed, such as the production places of the commodities.

The shopping management system can locate the commodities in the shopping cart and the convenience store in real time, pay attention to the position change at any time, and if the distance between a certain commodity and the shopping cart is found and is moved to the outside of the preset range from the inside of the preset range, the user may put the commodity into the shopping cart and does not want to buy the commodity, so the commodity is put back on the shelf, and the shopping management system can remove the commodity from the order.

In step 503, the shopping management system determines that the user has arrived at the exit area according to the location information of the located RFID tag, indicating that the user has completed shopping and has exited the convenience store. The shopping management system may check the order again in step 504, for example, may identify and locate the shopping cart and the goods again, determine the location relationship, and if the distance between the shopping cart and the goods is within the predetermined range w, determine whether the goods has been added to the order of the user corresponding to the shopping cart. If a certain item is within distance w from the cart, but not in the order, an alarm may be triggered in step 505.

After the alarm is triggered, if the commodity is put back to the shopping area, the alarm can be automatically released; otherwise, human intervention can be performed for processing. As shown in fig. 2, a plurality of cameras, such as the camera 210, are further installed in the convenience store, and video information collected by the cameras can also be transmitted to the shopping management system and can be stored in the database. After the alarm is triggered, the video can be called for manual intervention. In addition, if the shopping management system finds that the position of the RFID tag of a certain commodity in the convenience store disappears suddenly, people may damage the RFID tag on the commodity, and the shopping management system can trigger automatic alarm to perform manual intervention flow.

In another example, only when it is determined that the user has reached the exit area, it may be determined whether the distance between the article and the article container is within the predetermined range w based on the positioning positions of the article and the article container, that is, the association between the article and the shopping cart may be determined at the exit area, and the order information may be obtained without performing the determination in the storage area. In addition, the present disclosure does not exclude the use of other auxiliary discrimination techniques to assist in determining order information; for example, video information collected by a camera may be assisted, or various sensors may be assisted.

After the order information is determined, the shopping management system can generate a bill to be paid according to the order and push the bill to the user, and the user can pay in a fund account corresponding to the member ID of the user. Wherein, the user's fund account needs to have sufficient amount, or can connect with other sufficient payment channels capable of paying orders, otherwise, the user may be limited to leave with commodities exceeding the payment capability or trigger the warning device to give a prompt.

In the example of the present disclosure, the RFID tags are attached to the goods and the shopping cart, and the goods and the shopping cart are located by the RFID tags, which is not limited to this specific implementation, and may also be located by other locating methods, and other locating tags may be attached to the goods and the shopping cart, and the corresponding other locating technologies may be used for locating.

The method can quickly and accurately determine the order information of the consumer, automatically complete settlement and payment of the order, and the consumer can directly leave after shopping is completed without queuing and payment at the cashier desk, so that the shopping efficiency is improved, and the shopping experience is good.

The present disclosure also provides an order information determining apparatus, which may be the shopping management module in fig. 3 or the shopping management system in fig. 1. As shown in fig. 6, the apparatus may include: a container determination module 61, a distance determination module 62 and an order processing module 63.

A container determining module 61, configured to obtain a container identifier of a commodity container, where the container identifier corresponds to a user identifier of the user, and the commodity container is used to load a commodity purchased by the user;

a distance determining module 62, configured to determine a distance between the commodity and the commodity container according to the position information obtained by positioning the commodity and the commodity container;

and the order processing module 63 is configured to add the commodity information of the commodity into an order if the distance is within a predetermined range, where the order is an order of the user identifier corresponding to the container identifier.

In one example, the distance determining module 62 is specifically configured to: receiving label signals sent by positioning labels on the commodities and the commodity containers, wherein the label signals comprise the commodity information and container identifications; positioning the positioning label according to the label signal to respectively obtain the position information of the positioning label on the commodity and the positioning label on the commodity container; and calculating the distance between the positioning label on the commodity and the positioning label on the commodity container according to the position information.

In one example, the distance determination module 62 is further configured to determine an arrival exit area of the user according to the location information.

In an example, the order processing module 63 is specifically configured to: determining the distance between the commodity and a commodity container in a storage area of the commodity, and adding commodity information of the commodity into an order if the distance is within a preset range; checking whether goods within a predetermined range of the goods container are added to the order when it is determined that the user reaches an exit area according to the location information; and if the distance is within the preset range and the commodity is not in the order, triggering an alarm.

The apparatuses or modules illustrated in the above embodiments may be implemented by a computer chip or an entity, or by a product with certain functions. A typical implementation device is a computer, which may take the form of a personal computer, laptop computer, cellular telephone, camera phone, smart phone, personal digital assistant, media player, navigation device, email messaging device, game console, tablet computer, wearable device, or a combination of any of these devices.

For convenience of description, the above devices are described as being divided into various modules by functions, and are described separately. Of course, the functionality of the various modules may be implemented in the same one or more software and/or hardware implementations of the present disclosure.

The technical carrier involved in payment in the embodiment of the present application may include Near Field Communication (NFC), WIFI, 3G/4G/5G, POS machine card swiping technology, two-dimensional code scanning technology, barcode scanning technology, bluetooth, infrared, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message (MMS), and the like, for example.

The above description is only exemplary of the present disclosure and should not be taken as limiting the disclosure, as any modification, equivalent replacement, or improvement made within the spirit and principle of the present disclosure should be included in the scope of the present disclosure.

Claims (10)

1. An order information determination method, characterized in that the method is used for determining the association between a user and a commodity selected for purchase, and the method comprises the following steps:

acquiring a container identifier of a commodity container, wherein the container identifier corresponds to a user identifier of the user, and the commodity container is used for loading commodities purchased by the user;

determining the distance between the commodity and the commodity container according to the position information obtained by positioning the commodity and the commodity container;

and if the distance is within a preset range, adding the commodity information of the commodity into an order, wherein the order is the order of the user identifier corresponding to the container identifier.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein determining the distance between the item and the item container based on the location information from the positioning of the item and the item container comprises:

receiving label signals sent by positioning labels on the commodities and the commodity containers, wherein the label signals comprise the commodity information and container identifications;

positioning the positioning label according to the label signal to respectively obtain the position information of the positioning label on the commodity and the positioning label on the commodity container;

and calculating the distance between the positioning label on the commodity and the positioning label on the commodity container according to the position information.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the location tag is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein prior to determining the distance between the item and the item container, the method further comprises:

and determining the user arrival exit area according to the position information.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein determining a distance between the item and the item container, and if the distance is within a predetermined range, adding item information for the item to the order comprises:

determining the distance between the commodity and a commodity container in a storage area of the commodity, and adding commodity information of the commodity into an order if the distance is within a preset range;

checking whether goods within a predetermined range of the goods container are added to the order when it is determined that the user reaches an exit area according to the location information; and if the distance is within the preset range and the commodity is not in the order, triggering an alarm.

6. The method of claim 1,

the method further comprises the following steps: and if the distance is determined to be changed from the preset range to the outside of the preset range, removing the commodity from the order.

7. An order information determination apparatus, characterized in that the apparatus comprises:

the container determining module is used for acquiring a container identifier of a commodity container, wherein the container identifier corresponds to the user identifier of the user, and the commodity container is used for loading commodities purchased by the user;

the distance determining module is used for determining the distance between the commodity and the commodity container according to the position information obtained by positioning the commodity and the commodity container;

and the order processing module is used for adding the commodity information of the commodity into an order if the distance is within a preset range, wherein the order is an order of the user identifier corresponding to the container identifier.

8. The apparatus of claim 7,

the distance determining module is specifically configured to: receiving label signals sent by positioning labels on the commodities and the commodity containers, wherein the label signals comprise the commodity information and container identifications; positioning the positioning label according to the label signal to respectively obtain the position information of the positioning label on the commodity and the positioning label on the commodity container; and calculating the distance between the positioning label on the commodity and the positioning label on the commodity container according to the position information.

9. The apparatus of claim 7,

the distance determining module is further configured to determine that the user arrives at an exit area according to the location information.

10. The apparatus of claim 7,

the order processing module is specifically configured to: determining the distance between the commodity and a commodity container in a storage area of the commodity, and adding commodity information of the commodity into an order if the distance is within a preset range; checking whether goods within a predetermined range of the goods container are added to the order when it is determined that the user reaches an exit area according to the location information; and if the distance is within the preset range and the commodity is not in the order, triggering an alarm.