StORES Magazine - August 2007 - (Page 91)

ARTS UPDATE From Video Surveillance to Video Analytics BY RICHARD MADER V ideo surveillance, long used as a loss prevention tool, is expanding its scope to improve the customer shopping experience — and the retailer’s bottom line. Video equipment is used to scan the parking lot for customer safety, observe customers throughout the store to identify shopping habits, identify potential accidents, and send alerts on fixtures and displays that require attention and long lines or suspicious activities at POS. Activities captured on video can be converted to data for immediate action or periodic analysis. As video analytics takes on these expanded roles, the need arises for a common data format that still affords retailers flexibility in selecting vendors and applications. Fortunately, several leading retailers including Macy’s, Staples, Home Depot and SuperVALU, had the foresight to work with Cisco to develop standardization guidelines; now, ARTS is pleased to announce a project to turn these guidelines into industry standards. As retailers continue to find uses for video analytics, a large number of new products are coming to market. Because of the complexity involved in developing video analytic applications, vendors are optimizing their products for specific business functions (people counting, line-busting, traffic analysis, etc). Retailers wishing to analyze data across a range of behaviors and events will almost certainly need to work with several video analytic products. When Cisco initially requested that ARTS consider expanding the guidelines into WWW.STORES.ORG a full-fledged standard, we researched the current status of video analytics in retail to determine if there was sufficient industry interest to warrant the allocation of our scarce volunteer resources (ARTS only creates standards that will benefit the industry and be implemented by retailers). A little Internet research and a brief conversation with Joe LaRocca, NRF’s vice president of loss prevention, convinced us that video analytics holds great promise, Richard Mader is executive director of ARTS. analysis of the video data by business intelligence applications already in use. This fits nicely with the current ARTS project to develop a standard data warehouse model. These retailers also suggested a UnifiedPOS standard device connection to allow cameras from multiple manufacturers to interface easily with different POS applications. ARTS will begin the process of creating XML schemas to support the broad range of video analytic applications and explore the potential for adding video devices to UnifiedPOS at the next XML committee meeting, August 13-15 in Washington D.C. How quickly these standards become available depends Retailers wishing to analyze data across a range of behaviors and events will almost certainly need to work with several video analytic products with perhaps the greatest benefit being the ability to analyze customer in-store behavior. Retailers have spoken The potential business benefits were readily apparent, but were retailers intent upon implementing such standards? To answer these questions, ARTS organized a meeting at the NRF Loss Prevention Conference & EXPO in June to measure retailer interest. The response was much greater than anticipated: more than 40 industry professionals, representing 17 companies, loudly expressed the need for standards to allow aggregation of information from multiple systems and vendors. In addition to the capacity to integrate products over time as new video analytics tools are developed, retailers expressed a desire for standards to allow video data to merge or integrate with existing information warehouses or, at a minimum, to permit largely on the number and knowledge level of participating retailer and vendor volunteers. To register to attend the August kick-off meeting, please go to www.nrf-arts.org and click on “ARTS Meeting Registration.” Non-members are welcome to attend one meeting as a guest, contingent upon approval of the ARTS IP form. For more information on how to participate, contact me at arts@nrf.com or (202) 744-8217. STORES / AUGUST 2007 91 http://www.nrf-arts.org http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of StORES Magazine - August 2007

Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Upfront NRF News Retail People Concept2Watch Supermarkets Cover Story Online Marketing In-Store Marketing RFID Data Management Payment Systems Software Loss Prevention E-Commerce Risk Management Communications Loyalty Marketing Human Resources Mobile Commerce Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View Advertising Index Retail Industry Calendar

StORES Magazine - August 2007

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