Analyzing computer vision models for detecting customers: a practical experience in a mexican retail

Computer vision has become an important technology for obtaining meaningful data from visual content and providing valuable information for enhancing security controls, marketing, and logistic strategies in diverse industrial and business sectors. The retail sector constitutes an important part of the worldwide economy. Analyzing customer data and shopping behaviors has become essential to deliver the right products to customers, maximize profits, and increase competitiveness. In-person shopping is still a predominant form of retail despite the appearance of online retail outlets. As such, in-person retail is adopting computer vision models to monitor store products and customers. This research paper presents the development of a computer vision solution by Lytica Company to detect customers in Steren’s physical retail stores in Mexico. Current computer vision models such as SSD Mobilenet V2, YOLO-FastestV2, YOLOv5, and YOLOXn were analyzed to find the most accurate system according to the conditions and characteristics of the available devices. Some of the challenges addressed during the analysis of videos were obstruction and proximity of the customers, lighting conditions, position and distance of the camera concerning the customer when entering the store, image quality, and scalability of the process. Models were evaluated with the F1-score metric: 0.64 with YOLO FastestV2, 0.74 with SSD Mobilenetv2, 0.86 with YOLOv5n, 0.86 with YOLOv5xs, and 0.74 with YOLOXn. Although YOLOv5 achieved the best performance, YOLOXn presented the best balance between performance and FPS (frames per second) rate, considering the limited hardware and computing power conditions

The state of SQL-on-Hadoop in the cloud

Managed Hadoop in the cloud, especially SQL-on-Hadoop, has been gaining attention recently. On Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), analytical services like Hive and Spark come preconfigured for general-purpose and ready to use. Thus, giving companies a quick entry and on-demand deployment of ready SQL-like solutions for their big data needs. This study evaluates cloud services from an end-user perspective, comparing providers including: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Rackspace. The study focuses on performance, readiness, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the different solutions at entry/test level clusters sizes. Results are based on over 15,000 Hive queries derived from the industry standard TPC-H benchmark. The study is framed within the ALOJA research project, which features an open source benchmarking and analysis platform that has been recently extended to support SQL-on-Hadoop engines. The ALOJA Project aims to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of big data deployments and study their performance characteristics for optimization. The study benchmarks cloud providers across a diverse range instance types, and uses input data scales from 1GB to 1TB, in order to survey the popular entry-level PaaS SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, thereby establishing a common results-base upon which subsequent research can be carried out by the project. Initial results already show the main performance trends to both hardware and software configuration, pricing, similarities and architectural differences of the evaluated PaaS solutions. Whereas some providers focus on decoupling storage and computing resources while offering network-based elastic storage, others choose to keep the local processing model from Hadoop for high performance, but reducing flexibility. Results also show the importance of application-level tuning and how keeping up-to-date hardware and software stacks can influence performance even more than replicating the on-premises model in the cloud.This work is partially supported by the Microsoft Azure for Research program, the European Research Council (ERC) under the EUs Horizon 2020 programme (GA 639595), the Spanish Ministry of Education (TIN2015-65316-P), and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft