Computer Vision in the store
AI that translates the physical world into data - across 14,000 Lidl & Kaufland stores
- Company
- Schwarz Digits (Lidl · Kaufland)
- Role
- Senior Solution Architect (prev. Team Lead)
- Place
- Neckarsulm
- Scope
- Concept → pilot → rollout → operations
Since 2020 I design, build and operate AI computer-vision solutions for Lidl and Kaufland stores - across the full solution lifecycle, from concept and market research to pilots, rollout and operations. I'm the interface between business and IT. In 2025 I deliberately handed over team leadership to go all-in on architecture and hands-on engineering.
01Concept, integration, piloting and evaluation
Concept, integration, piloting and evaluation of computer-vision solutions in >50 Lidl stores across >5 countries. Testing and evaluating multiple model providers.
I was closely involved in the overall system design and the integration into our infrastructure - POS systems, cameras, edge servers, interfaces, deployment, monitoring, automation.
Developed an analytics workflow and Streamlit dashboards that visualize and analyze millions of MQTT events.
Built a labeling tool and test runner in Python that let us a) create a gold-standard dataset and b) replay that dataset against the vendor systems using virtual camera streams and POS events, computing precision / recall / F1 fully automatically.
02Scaling into thousands of stores
System design and solution architecture - scalable into thousands of stores.
Building automations with Python and Ansible in combination with Kubernetes. Building Grafana dashboards for monitoring and alerting. Examples: automated camera configuration, CV-based image health checks for hundreds of cameras (blur detection, FoV alignment before store opening).
It always comes back to the same question: how do you run vision models efficiently, performantly and securely on edge servers across thousands of stores?
03More than tech
Five years of team leadership (2020–2025) - building, developing and steering the team - plus strategic consulting (edge vs. cloud, data privacy, procurement, compliance), cost & capacity planning, and reporting up to C-level.