​​How to Use a Product Recognition API

James Gallagher's guide explains how to use the Roboflow product recognition API to identify and locate products or detect empty spaces on retail shelves, which can enhance inventory management and ensure compliance with planograms. The API can be used on cloud or personal hardware and requires a Roboflow account to access an API key. By running the Roboflow Inference system, users can deploy a pre-trained model to analyze images and identify products or gaps on shelves, with blue boxes indicating products and yellow boxes showing empty spots. The guide further discusses integrating this product recognition system with a zero-shot classification model like CLIP to match products against a planogram, ensuring they are shelved correctly. This combination allows businesses to automate shelf validation processes, comparing current shelf stock with reference images and prompting human checks if discrepancies are found.