Will video analytics save retail market?

The world of computer vision has continued to evolve in recent years with computer surpassing the accuracy of human being. Computer vision has enabled many applications that were only part of science fiction a short time ago. The rise of AI has been instrumental to get to the level of accuracy that market demands. A new application enabled for computer vision called video analytics, has emerged in recent years. Video analytics deals with extraction of data from incoming video and generating results that are meaningful to humans.

Over the years, many businesses have been fitted with security infrastructure consisting of networked cameras and NVRs. Historically that data was discarded or stored for further analysis. A guard was made to watch screen to detect any security threats. Video analytics promised to shake that landscape by not only eliminating the need for security guards but also providing users with alerts for security threats. Over the past few years, security has been primary driver of video analytics solutions and many companies offer products pertaining to security needs of businesses.   

However, user base and vendors quickly realized that the output of such system can also  be used for other business intelligence purposes. Output data venerated by video analytics has been utilized for for marketing, operations analysis and other business intelligence purposes. Retail industry, which has been struggling to keep up with the changing user buying habits, was one of the first to jump on the opportunity to enable business intelligence using video analytics.

There are multitudes of use cases for video analytics in retails business intelligence and the usage has been increasing steadily in recent years. For example, by analyzing the same camera feed used for security, one can count number of people, their interaction with different merchandise within store, their traffic patterns and so on. This feature of video analytics systems enabled retailers do better marketing (analyzing if signs and merchandize got enough attention), operations optimization (if the line is long, send additional counter clerks), merchandise placement (place items where there is most traffic) and so on. Many of the video analytics vendors such as Avigilon and Briefcam have benefitted from this.

In addition to the analytics, a new group of companies is now emerging who are trying to ease the retail shopping experience. Amazon led the innovation by introducing  Amazon go. Amazon go application eliminates the need for checkout counter and makes overall shopping experience as easy as taking a stroll in the grocery store for consumer. Since then, many companies have emerged in the space trying to enhance shopping experience. Standard Cognition for example, a San Fransicso base company, has raised over $86 million. Another start-up called AiFi has raised $15 million in capital. 

The retail industry has also helped fuel first funded unicorn ($1 billion valuation) in video analytics.  Trax Retail, a Singapore headquartered company, achieved that status by reaching $1.1 billion valuation with their latest round of funding. Trax focuses solely on retail and provides shelf optimization solutions. The company started out as providing services and solution to retail merchandise brands such as Coca Cola. It provided them with a mobile application that their field agents used to take pictures in a retail outlet that was then uploaded to Trax servers. Trax ran AI algorithms on it to come up with pertinent analytics for shelf optimization to generate visibility and optimize sales. The company has since diversified and has a large portfolio of products and solutions for retail.

Will video analytics save retail market?

The world of computer vision has continued to evolve in recent years with computer surpassing the accuracy of human being. Computer vision has enabled many applications that were only part of science fiction a short time ago. The rise of AI has been instrumental to get to the level of accuracy that market demands. A new application enabled for computer vision called video analytics, has emerged in recent years. Video analytics deals with extraction of data from incoming video and generating results that are meaningful to humans.

Over the years, many businesses have been fitted with security infrastructure consisting of networked cameras and NVRs. Historically that data was discarded or stored for further analysis. A guard was made to watch screen to detect any security threats. Video analytics promised to shake that landscape by not only eliminating the need for security guards but also providing users with alerts for security threats. Over the past few years, security has been primary driver of video analytics solutions and many companies offer products pertaining to security needs of businesses.   

However, user base and vendors quickly realized that the output of such system can also  be used for other business intelligence purposes. Output data venerated by video analytics has been utilized for for marketing, operations analysis and other business intelligence purposes. Retail industry, which has been struggling to keep up with the changing user buying habits, was one of the first to jump on the opportunity to enable business intelligence using video analytics.

There are multitudes of use cases for video analytics in retails business intelligence and the usage has been increasing steadily in recent years. For example, by analyzing the same camera feed used for security, one can count number of people, their interaction with different merchandise within store, their traffic patterns and so on. This feature of video analytics systems enabled retailers do better marketing (analyzing if signs and merchandize got enough attention), operations optimization (if the line is long, send additional counter clerks), merchandise placement (place items where there is most traffic) and so on. Many of the video analytics vendors such as Avigilon and Briefcam have benefitted from this.

In addition to the analytics, a new group of companies is now emerging who are trying to ease the retail shopping experience. Amazon led the innovation by introducing  Amazon go. Amazon go application eliminates the need for checkout counter and makes overall shopping experience as easy as taking a stroll in the grocery store for consumer. Since then, many companies have emerged in the space trying to enhance shopping experience. Standard Cognition for example, a San Fransicso base company, has raised over $86 million. Another start-up called AiFi has raised $15 million in capital. 

The retail industry has also helped fuel first funded unicorn ($1 billion valuation) in video analytics.  Trax Retail, a Singapore headquartered company, achieved that status by reaching $1.1 billion valuation with their latest round of funding. Trax focuses solely on retail and provides shelf optimization solutions. The company started out as providing services and solution to retail merchandise brands such as Coca Cola. It provided them with a mobile application that their field agents used to take pictures in a retail outlet that was then uploaded to Trax servers. Trax ran AI algorithms on it to come up with pertinent analytics for shelf optimization to generate visibility and optimize sales. The company has since diversified and has a large portfolio of products and solutions for retail.

Over the period of last five years, the video analytics industry has provided benefits to many industries and retail is yet another example of that. A new generation of video analytics products that are being targeted towards specific vertical are not starting to hit the market. Retail vertical is a making the best use of the analytics offered by rich data source of video. Proper usage of video analytics technology can potentially help put retail back to its growth mode that has been missing for the past few years.