People Counting - Retail

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

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

Interplay can connect to existing closed-circuit video platforms and 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 with 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.