Retail video analytics: An overview and survey

Today retail video analytics has gone beyond the traditional domain of security and loss prevention by providing retailers insightful business intelligence such as store traffic statistics and queue data. Such information allows for enhanced customer experience, optimized store performance, reduced operational costs, and ultimately higher profitability. This paper gives an overview of various camera-based applications in retail as well as the state-of-the-art computer vision techniques behind them. It also presents some of the promising technical directions for exploration in retail video analytics. © 2013 SPIE-IS&T.