24th Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies
Abstract Submission

652. Edge-Optimized Computer Vision for Financial Inclusion: Dendritic Neural Networks in Infrastructure-Constrained Retail Environments

Invited abstract in session Business Management in Dynamic Emerging Markets, stream Selected Aspects of International Finance and OR.

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Helper Zhou
School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, University of KwaZulu Natal
2. Alford Toruvanda
Research and Development, QUANTLYTIX
3. Gordon Dash
Finance and Decision Sciences, University of Rhode Island
4. Nina Kajiji
Computer Science and Statistics, University of Rhode Island, and The NKD Group, Inc.

Abstract

Informal retail sustains billions in emerging markets, but digital POS systems often fail due to unstable connectivity, low literacy, and dynamic inventories. This paper introduces a camera-first, offline POS using smartphones for inventory tracking without barcodes or SKUs. Using vegetable recognition, we evaluate dendritic optimization via PerforatedAI to enhance lightweight vision models under edge constraints. MobileNetV3-Small achieved 97.44% accuracy (vs. 95.16%), a 47.1% error reduction without added complexity. Results show impact of dendritic optimization.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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