A major retailer was challenged with trying to count the people that are entering their stores at any given time.  As a supermarket chain, parents would often enter the store with children in strollers or sitting in the shopping carts.  The existing legacy camera system was not smart enough to “see” and count these children. Families are an essential part of the merchandising strategy-- so this data is crucial to success.

When connected to existing closed-circuit camera systems, Interplay® has the ability to count people within a retail or office environment.  A major retailer was struggling with their system’s ability to distinguish children while riding in carts, or when children were in strollers.  As a family-oriented retailer, accurate data is essential to improving merchandising: by knowing the overall population inside the store at any time, and by knowing where customers were lingering or trafficking the most, the store is able to gauge merchandising efficiency as an overall heat map of the store layout.

Interplay is able to connect to existing closed-circuit video platforms and can run on an edge server directly on-premises, or remotely inside a corporate data center or cloud environment. The resulting count data can be piped via connecting nodes to almost any software system or application that has an appropriate API. This could include merchandising software to run discounts in real-time, push alerts to consumers in the store, or even connect to existing HVAC systems to turn up the AC in response to more people in the store.