Nielsen (NLSN) and the University of Oxford today announced a two-year collaboration to advance the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and classify consumer packaged goods (CPG) products on shelves in retail stores. Facilitated between Nielsen's Image Recognition group and the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford, this partnership brings together the world's largest pool of product reference data with industry-leading brainpower around AI technology to yield greater accuracy in product identification and discovery. Through this partnership, Nielsen is working directly with University of Oxford Professors Andrew Zisserman and Andrea Vedaldi (Department of Engineering Science), world-renowned computer scientists and pioneers in image recognition and AI research. Zisserman, Vedaldi and their team of research scientists will work together with Nielsen to more precisely and quickly identify and classify in-store products based on product images captured through Nielsen's eCollection solution. The Oxford researchers will focus on building and enhancing the eCollection algorithms with increasingly advanced deep learning capabilities, enabling a more automatic detection of store products, promotions and prices without the need for manual intervention.