Detecting Customers' Buying Events on a Real-life Database

TitleDetecting Customers' Buying Events on a Real-life Database
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsPopa M, Gritti T, Rothkrantz LJM, Shan C, Wiggers P
Editorundefined, Diaz-Pernil D, Kropatsch WG, Molina-Abril H, Real P
Conference NameComputer Analysis of Images and Patterns, 14th International Conference, CAIP 2011
Date Published08/2011
PublisherSpringer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
Conference LocationSeville, Spain
ISBN Number978-3-642-23672-3
KeywordsHidden Markov Models, Optical Flow, Shopping Behavior, Trajectory analysis
Abstract

Video Analytics covers a large set of methodologies which aim at automatically extracting information from video material. In the context of retail, the possibility to ef fortlessly gather statistics on customer shopping behavior is very attractive. In this work, we focus on the task of automatic classi cation of customer behavior, with the objecting to recognize buying events. The experiments are performed on several hours of video collected in a supermarket. Given the vast eff ort of the research community on the task of tracking, we assume the existence of a video tracking system capable of producing a trajectory for every individual, and currently manually annotate the input videos with trajectories. From the annotated video recordings, we extract features related to the spatio-temporal behavior of the trajectory, and to the user
movement, and analyze the shopping sequences using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). First results show that it is possible to discriminate between buying and non-buying behavior with an accuracy of 74%.