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Video analytics in the retail space

Established in 2001, Ipsotek has grown into an award-winning video analytics company known throughout the security industry. Its advanced technology has changed and evolved to keep up with market trends whilst continuously improving solutions to better meet clients’ needs and challenges by use of video content analysis.

Ipsotek (represented by e-Thele) as a video analytics platform offers the client a few options when it comes to the monitoring and alarming of retail facilities. A few important issues need to be taken into consideration to ensure the profitability as well as operation efficiency of the establishment.

The following come to mind first and are explained in detail how the benefits of having a system like this will expand your business.

Operational efficiency through the following:

* Staffing.

* Tag and track.

* Store layout optimisation.

Crowd management

* Store footfall and occupancy reports.

* Queue monitoring.

* Density measurement.

Intrusion detection

* Warehouses and secure zones.

* Smoke detection.

Store footfall

Typical counting solutions work with accuracies ±15% where Ipsotek’s ability to understand and interpret crowded scenes allow for ±5% accuracies.

The benefits are:

* To determine conversion rates of the whole store and individual departments based on the footfall entering those departments.

* To more efficiently deploy staff.

* Evaluate success of advertising campaigns.

Queue monitoring

Queue monitoring would be an obvious monitoring of number of people joining and leaving a queue to predict queue waiting times which would be obvious in the banking or ATM sections of the facility, or even at the pay-on-foot to ensure there are no delays. This will alert management of queue times that are reaching unacceptable levels

Benefits:

* Display to customers predicted queue times.

* Monitor average queue times.

* Reduce queue times by optimising staff deployment.

* Effective, real-time queue management.

* Improve checkout operator performance.

People tracking

Analysing the movements of all customers has enormous potential for data mining. Each person’s journey throughout the camera network becomes a piece of metadata intrinsically linked to the recorded video. When the customer finishes their journey at the till the eventual purchases can be linked and compared to the journey and areas where the customer dwelt and purchased (or not). Should the customer identify themselves at the till (e.g. with a loyalty card) the opportunity to examine that customers behaviour becomes more of an opportunity.

Density measurement

Calculates the density of a zone by what percentage of floor space is taken up with people. When density of a room reaches a set percentage an alarm can be triggered. Benefits for having this analytic on your site would include:

* Detect how many people go within a particular zone or aisle.

* Optimise staff levels.

* Optimise floor layout.

* Determine floor hotspot and dead aisles.

Store layout optimisation

Layout experimentation becomes a reality with this type of analytic. Different store layouts can be tested and the Tag and Track data generated can be used to objectively measure the effect of those changes.

Dwell zones

Tag and Track can identify dwell time hot spots which can be seeded with impulse purchase items

Power aisles

Tag and Track will highlight power aisles

Warehouses and secure zones

It is now possible to secure sensitive areas where the use of physical barriers or access control systems are prohibitive. It ensures that all persons crossing a virtual line are carrying RFID security tags at the same time ignoring objects such as roll pallets and forklifts. It can be set to immediately receive an alert when a person does not have an RFID tag as well as tail gaiting through secure areas.

Benefits:

* Improved security into secure areas.

* More efficient staff deployment.

* Reduce stock shrinkage from warehouse.

Smoke detection

Through the scenario based analytics it can automatically identify smoke in areas where conventional smoke detection can’t be installed.

Benefits:

* Can be installed in areas where traditional smoke detectors may not be an option.

* Requires no configuration.

* No additional licences required.

* Use the same cameras that you are detecting intruders on for smoke detection.

Analytics have matured, and because of the early hype might have to prove a little bit more than just detecting smoke in a clothing store full of people. But it is definitely making its way and this might be a piece of the puzzle missing from a fully integrated security platform.

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