METHOD OF MERCHANDISING FOR CHECKOUT LANES

Methods and computer readable media for recognizing and identifying items located on the belt of a counter and/or in a shopping cart of a store environment for the purpose of reducing/preventing bottom-of-the-basket loss, checking out the items automatically, reducing the checkout time, preventing consumer fraud, increasing revenue and replacing a conventional UPC scanning system to enhance the checking out speed. The images of the items taken by visual sensors may be analyzed to extract features using the scale-invariant feature-transformation (SIFT) method. Then, the extracted features are compared to those of trained images stored in a database to find a set of matches. Based on the set of matches, the items are recognized and associated with one or more instructions, commands or actions without the need for personnel to visually see the items, such as by having to come out from behind a check out counter or peering over a check out counter.