Real-time Embedded Person Detection and Tracking for Shopping Behaviour Analysis

Shopping behaviour analysis through counting and tracking of people in shop-like environments offers valuable information for store operators and provides key insights in the stores layout (e.g. frequently visited spots). Instead of using extra staff for this, automated on-premise solutions are preferred. These automated systems should be cost-effective, preferably on lightweight embedded hardware, work in very challenging situations (e.g. handling occlusions) and preferably work real-time. We solve this challenge by implementing a real-time TensorRT optimized YOLOv3-based pedestrian detector, on a Jetson TX2 hardware platform. By combining the detector with a sparse optical flow tracker we assign a unique ID to each customer and tackle the problem of loosing partially occluded customers. Our detector-tracker based solution achieves an average precision of 81.59% at a processing speed of 10 FPS. Besides valuable statistics, heat maps of frequently visited spots are extracted and used as an overlay on the video stream

Eavesdropping Whilst You're Shopping: Balancing Personalisation and Privacy in Connected Retail Spaces

Physical retailers, who once led the way in tracking with loyalty cards and `reverse appends', now lag behind online competitors. Yet we might be seeing these tables turn, as many increasingly deploy technologies ranging from simple sensors to advanced emotion detection systems, even enabling them to tailor prices and shopping experiences on a per-customer basis. Here, we examine these in-store tracking technologies in the retail context, and evaluate them from both technical and regulatory standpoints. We first introduce the relevant technologies in context, before considering privacy impacts, the current remedies individuals might seek through technology and the law, and those remedies' limitations. To illustrate challenging tensions in this space we consider the feasibility of technical and legal approaches to both a) the recent `Go' store concept from Amazon which requires fine-grained, multi-modal tracking to function as a shop, and b) current challenges in opting in or out of increasingly pervasive passive Wi-Fi tracking. The `Go' store presents significant challenges with its legality in Europe significantly unclear and unilateral, technical measures to avoid biometric tracking likely ineffective. In the case of MAC addresses, we see a difficult-to-reconcile clash between privacy-as-confidentiality and privacy-as-control, and suggest a technical framework which might help balance the two. Significant challenges exist when seeking to balance personalisation with privacy, and researchers must work together, including across the boundaries of preferred privacy definitions, to come up with solutions that draw on both technology and the legal frameworks to provide effective and proportionate protection. Retailers, simultaneously, must ensure that their tracking is not just legal, but worthy of the trust of concerned data subjects.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the PETRAS/IoTUK/IET Living in the Internet of Things Conference, London, United Kingdom, 28-29 March 201

Hierarchical Attention Network for Action Segmentation

The temporal segmentation of events is an essential task and a precursor for the automatic recognition of human actions in the video. Several attempts have been made to capture frame-level salient aspects through attention but they lack the capacity to effectively map the temporal relationships in between the frames as they only capture a limited span of temporal dependencies. To this end we propose a complete end-to-end supervised learning approach that can better learn relationships between actions over time, thus improving the overall segmentation performance. The proposed hierarchical recurrent attention framework analyses the input video at multiple temporal scales, to form embeddings at frame level and segment level, and perform fine-grained action segmentation. This generates a simple, lightweight, yet extremely effective architecture for segmenting continuous video streams and has multiple application domains. We evaluate our system on multiple challenging public benchmark datasets, including MERL Shopping, 50 salads, and Georgia Tech Egocentric datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The evaluated datasets encompass numerous video capture settings which are inclusive of static overhead camera views and dynamic, ego-centric head-mounted camera views, demonstrating the direct applicability of the proposed framework in a variety of settings.Comment: Published in Pattern Recognition Letter

Group-In: Group Inference from Wireless Traces of Mobile Devices

This paper proposes Group-In, a wireless scanning system to detect static or mobile people groups in indoor or outdoor environments. Group-In collects only wireless traces from the Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices for group inference. The key problem addressed in this work is to detect not only static groups but also moving groups with a multi-phased approach based only noisy wireless Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSIs) observed by multiple wireless scanners without localization support. We propose new centralized and decentralized schemes to process the sparse and noisy wireless data, and leverage graph-based clustering techniques for group detection from short-term and long-term aspects. Group-In provides two outcomes: 1) group detection in short time intervals such as two minutes and 2) long-term linkages such as a month. To verify the performance, we conduct two experimental studies. One consists of 27 controlled scenarios in the lab environments. The other is a real-world scenario where we place Bluetooth scanners in an office environment, and employees carry beacons for more than one month. Both the controlled and real-world experiments result in high accuracy group detection in short time intervals and sampling liberties in terms of the Jaccard index and pairwise similarity coefficient.Comment: This work has been funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT and No.871249 LOCUS projects. The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the EU. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors. Proc. of ACM/IEEE IPSN'20, 202

INTELLIGENT VIDEO SURVEILLANCE OF HUMAN MOTION: ANOMALY DETECTION

Intelligent video surveillance is a system that can highlight extraction and video summarization that require recognition of the activities occurring in the video without any human supervision. Surveillance systems are extremely helpful to guard or protect you from any dangerous condition. In this project, we propose a system that can track and detect abnormal behavior in indoor environment. By concentrating on inside house enviromnent, we want to detect any abnormal behavior between adult and toddler to avoid abusing to happen. In general, the frameworks of a video surveillance system include the following stages: background estimator, segmentation, detection, tracking, behavior understanding and description. We use training behavior profile to collect the description and generate statistically behavior to perform anomaly detection later. We begin with modeling the simplest actions like: stomping, slapping, kicking, pointed sharp or blunt object that do not require sophisticated modeling. A method to model actions with more complex dynamic are then discussed. The results of the system manage to track adult figure, toddler figure and harm object as third subject. With this system, it can bring attention of human personnel security. For future work, we recommend to continue design methods for higher level representation of complex activities to do the matching anomaly detection with real-time video surveillance. We also propose the system to embed with hardware solution for triggered the matching detection as output