Multimodal ranking for non-compliance detection in retail surveillance

Abstract

In retail stores, cashier non-compliance activities at the Point of Sale (POS) are one of the prevalent sources of retail loss. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reliably rank the list of detected non-compliance activities of a given retail surveillance system, thereby provide a means of significantly reducing the false alarms and improving the precision in non-compliance detection. Our approach represents each detected non-compliance activity using multi-modal features coming from video data, transaction logs (TLog) data and intermediate results of the video analytics. We then learn a binary classifier that successfully separate true positives and false positives in a labeled training set. A confidence score for each detection can then be computed using the decision value of the trained classifier, and a ranked list of detections can be formed based on this score. The benefit from having this ranked list is two-fold. First, a large number of false alarms can be avoided by simply keeping the top part of the list and discarding the rest. Second, a trade off between precision and recall can easily be performed by sliding the discarding threshold along this ranked list. Experimental results on a large scale dataset captured from real stores demonstrate that our approach achieves better precision than a state-of-the-art system at the same recall. Our approach can also reach an operating point that exceeds the retailers' expectation in terms of precision, while retaining an acceptable recall of more than 60%. © 2012 IEEE.