ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,567,167, issued on March 3, was assigned to Walmart Apollo LLC (Bentonville, Ark.).

"Systems and methods for analyzing depth in images obtained in product storage facilities to detect outlier items" was invented by Han Zhang (Allen, Texas), Yilun Chen (Dallas), Lingfeng Zhang (Dallas), Adam Cantor (Austin, Texas), Avinash M. Jade (Bangalore, India), Benjamin R. Ellison (San Francisco), William Craig Robinson Jr. (Centerton, Ark.), Mingquan Yuan (Flower Mound, Texas), Zhaoliang Duan (Frisco, Texas) and Wei Wang (Dallas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In some embodiments, apparatuses and methods are provided herein useful to processing capt...