The Intelligent Security Series: The Ever-Changing Retail Environment
With ISC West just over a week away, we are gearing up for the show by discussing how security surveillance technology is evolving and advancing. One of the areas we’re seeing the most development is in the retail space. Businesses are exploring the use of advanced security surveillance technology to provide additional capabilities beyond the traditional uses such as loss prevention, and looking at how advanced analytics can provide business intelligence information that improves the customer experience by creating a personalized shopping experience and provide insight into potential targeted marketing strategies—all while maintaining the safety and security of their employees and merchandise.
Last week, we spoke about how we expect to see more security cameras integrate analytics into hardware, and this directly affects the retail space. Business intelligence features such as heat mapping and people counting are just a few examples of new software capabilities that are being integrated into the latest security cameras, as shown by our ULTRA 360. Here’s a closer look at these analytics capabilities and how they can benefit retailers:
Heat Mapping
This capability can aggregate the history of a scene’s movement and enable retailers to easily identify dwell time, indicating hot spots, bottlenecks and areas with limited traffic in their retail environment. The High Traffic Zone mode permits you to visualize the quantity of people passing through the store, and the Long Stay Zone mode allows a visualization of the time people dwell in a particular area, as shown below. These features help retailers gain insight into floor behavior and the opportunity to see firsthand what is working and not working in their store to attract customers.
People Counting
People counting assists with quantifying activity in a scene. Users can set a virtual line anywhere in a scene and the camera will automatically count people at that location. Retailers can use this data to design the best layout for their stores as well as to help judge the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.
We fully expect security surveillance and analytic capabilities in retail environments to be a hot topic at ISC West this year. We’re looking forward to sharing how we provide retailers with the solutions they desire to not only protect their assets but to gain valuable insights into their customer’s behavior.
What are you looking forward to at ISC West 2015? Stop by booth #14039 and let us know starting Wednesday, April 15, or tweet us at @PanasonicForBiz with the hashtag #ISCWest2015.
