The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog
- According to a CBS report, a company named Veesion is enabling store owners to quickly identify shoplifters in the store. Veesion sends store owners a real-time notification that looks pretty close to a Snapchat D.M. with text like “Very suspicious.
- That kind of A.I. can integrate with existing security cameras, making it easy for store owners to implement. The A.I. can keep Argus-like attention on shopper activity across the entirety of the store’s video camera’s feeds.
- This sort of technology has precedence, as traffic-infraction-detecting A.I. has been in place for some time now, allowing governments to automatically identify whether someone, for instance, ran a red light.
- How does this kind of A.I. work, exactly? Through computer vision (C.V.), a subfield of A.I. that develops algorithms that enable A.I. to “see”, “hear”, and enjoy other senses. Another significant part is done in training, where A.I. analyzes a ton of video feeds to become skilled at recognizing the difference between a shoplifting incident and just regular shopping.
- The multiple components are human detection, pause estimation, and object detection. The A.I. offers probabilities of the likelihood of someone’s actions, including stealing an item.
Why This Technology Might Be Attractive to Brick-and-Mortar Store
The writer of this blog will use a fanciful and entertaining example of what a fictional store could get out of using this non-fictional technology.
This fictional store is called The Animal Ears Emporium, which offers a very specific kind of costume item: (fake) animal ears, such as cat ears, that people can wear to make it look like they have animal ears for ears.
Over the years, The Animal Ears Emporium has always suffered from a less-than-ideal net profit that shoplifters made less than ideal. For some reason, people are always coming into this store to steal the cow-ears costume item.
Though security cameras are already in place, with multiple trained on the cow-ears section, the petty thievery does not let up, largely because the store owners are not quick enough to stop the petty thieves.
And so, the dreadful statistic of 1 in 48 shoplifters being caught, and only half of those caught getting turned over to police for prosecution, is true for The Animal Ears Emporium.
However, the store owners may have found a solution in cracking down on shoplifting in the form of A.I.
What Store Owners Can Get Out of This A.I.
Veesion is just one example of this kind of A.I., so be assured that there is likely plenty of A.I. out there that can perform a similar service for a brick-and-mortar business.
So, in the case of these A.I. platforms, how exactly do they work?
Keeping in mind The Animal Ears Emporium, consider that the store already has plenty of data of shoplifters shoplifting those cow-ear costume items.
A quality A.I. system for shoplifting detection will most likely allow users the option to personalize the A.I. for the particular store.
One of the main benefits of that personalization is that it allows the A.I. to become familiar with the store’s general layout–a good A.I. will also be adaptable, largely through machine learning, to new layouts of e.g. certain product-stands changing position.
But another significant plus of personalization is that it will allow the A.I. to get used to what shoplifting specifically resembles in a particular store, such as The Animal Ears Emporium.
How This A.I. Could Help Stop Shoplifting
The major benefit here is that the A.I. offers a real-time notification of a likely shoplifting event.
In the case of Veesion, the A.I. always keeps running probability-percentages of what actions the people in the video are most likely doing. For instance, identifying whether someone is standing or walking.
Object detection also comes into play by identifying whether someone is using a store bag or, say, a backpack or purse to store the item.
In the case of The Animal Ears Emporium, imagine that a would-be shoplifter has a hand purse and attempts to casually drop a cow-ears costume item into it.
Thanks to the A.I. shoplifting-detector, the store owners get an immediate notification on their phones that a shoplifting event is most likely taking place.
The store owners whip around in their all-electric people-mover (the store is indeed quite massive) into the Bovine Ears aisle and inquire, in that hostilely loud faux-polite voice that the rightfully angered sometimes employ, whether the would-be shoplifter would like a transparent reusable The Animal Emporium tote bag (at a $5.99 price, so the purpose this tote bag proves to be a sort of a tax on shoplifters) to put that cow-ears costume item in.
Ashamed and befuddled and thwarted, the shoplifter assents, purchasing the item with head hung in shame. Shoplift averted.
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