Peter Hayles, Field Application Engineer, Western Digital explores the opportunities for smart video in the retail sector.
Remember when video in retail evoked only low-resolution footage from security cameras, fixed in the corners of a store for theft prevention?
While security and crime deterrence are still the main reasons for using cameras in shops, smart video surveillance systems now offer additional value – especially with the advent of 4K/8K, AI and machine learning (ML).
Gone are the days when security cameras were solely installed to detect shoplifting.
Today, they enable real-time monitoring, employee accountability and training and customer safety.
Smart video systems today go beyond security and provide valuable data and insights to improve operational efficiency and sales, leading to an overall increase in customer experience.
In today’s dynamic world, brick-and-mortar stores can further build and increase their existing business opportunities by becoming more resourceful with innovative technology.
By collecting data from videos, a tech-savvy retailer can uncover behaviours and patterns across different groups inside their store. This includes:
By monitoring store premises, modern cameras contribute to the customer experience, providing insights into shopping patterns, assisting in optimising shop layout and enhancing the overall customer experience.
As a result of this, retail managers are able to increase customer footfall and loyalty over time
Smart video systems offer valuable data on customer foot traffic, dwell times, flow and other shopping behaviours.
These insights do not only benefit customer experience but improve operational efficiency by aiding decisions on product placement, store layout and staffing.
An example is an optimised queue management that predicts peak hours and reduces waiting times, therefore helping to increase customer satisfaction and retention.
Data insights delivered by modern smart cameras allow retailers to personalise marketing strategies and trigger targeted ads on in-store screens based on demographics (age, gender, mood) and shopping behaviours.
Furthermore, pricing models can adjust prices based on demand, competition or customer engagement
Modern surveillance systems are at the heart of cashout-fee stores, enabling seamless, frictionless shopping experiences.
They enable autonomous checkouts (“Just Walk Out-Technology”) by tracking shoppers as they pick up or return items in real-time.
This is possible thanks to a combination of multiple cameras, sensors and computer vision that create a virtual profile of each shopper, follow them throughout the store and associate their actions (e.g., picking up an item) with their virtual cart.
The smart video system calculates the total based on what the customer took and automatically charges their account or preferred payment method when they walk out of the store.
As a result of this, retailers can further increase their operational efficiency by eliminating traditional checkouts
Smart video cameras open up completely new revenue streams for retailers.
By selling anonymised shopper insights to brands, they can help suppliers and manufacturers understand consumer behaviour better and refine their in-store positioning, marketing strategies and pricing.
Smart video cameras today help identify and reduce incidents of shoplifting, employee theft and inventory shrinkage in real-time.
By monitoring both customer and staff, retailers can significantly decrease losses, directly impacting profitability and increased profit margins
Smart video footage can be used to monitor employee performance, ensure adherence to company policies and identify training needs.
This promotes a culture of accountability and continuous improvement among staff
Thanks to technological innovations like AI and ML and a growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, modern surveillance systems are a business intelligence asset for retailers to drive efficiency, increase revenue and enhance customer experience – as well as to create new services and even future-proof their business.
However, to unlock the potential of their data, retailers and shop owners must think about an appropriate storage infrastructure that allows them to collect, store and analyse this information.
Today, AI presents a significant opportunity for retailers.
As managers increasingly adopt AI-powered smart video systems to enhance store security, there are some technical and operational consideration that need to be kept in mind.
AI systems can bring a wealth of new vulnerabilities for cyber-threats and attacks, especially when data is mismanaged or orphaned without proper encryption or in an unmonitored location.
Implementing a secure, centralised video management system (VMS) with end-to-end encryption helps protect smart video data from vulnerabilities and unauthorised access.
Today, intelligent video architectures also require innovative storage technologies that provide the necessary flexibility, performance, capacity and scalability to keep up with the ever-increasing amount of created and captured video footage, while simultaneously supporting appropriate data security functionalities.
In the age of data deluge, it is important to maintain diverse, yet accurate, AI training datasets.
AI models in smart video systems rely heavily on high-quality, high-resolution video and data to learn patterns, whether it’s for facial recognition, object tracking or behaviour analysis.
Poor data hygiene like mislabeled footage, dropped frames or corrupted video can lead to false positives or negatives, misidentification and missed detections.
Especially in mission-critical environments such as traffic monitoring and retail analytics, decisions based on faulty video data can be costly.
Data hygiene also helps to reduce bias or noise, making the system more reliable in real-world applications.
Furthermore, it ensures that personally identifiable information is protected and the data is stored and processed according to regulations like GDPR.
AI-powered smart video surveillance is at the cutting-edge of technology innovation and many retailers operate with legacy systems that are not yet compatible with modern solutions.
Upgrading or integrating new technologies can be costly and disruptive, and scaling a solution can be complex.
To manage this, retail managers can standardise camera and data storage types across locations, ensure comprehensive staff training for installation and monitoring to increase long-term reliability and look to utilise hard drive disks for centralised, scalable storage solutions that will enable video data infrastructure to be scaled across locations.
Keeping these considerations in mind is essential to successfully implement technology-forward solutions to video in retail.
Today, there are various storage systems for smart video that can be used in retail environments.
From Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) and video analysis servers to enhance shopping experience and drive sales, to AI and deep learning systems, they all have one thing in common: They rely on purpose-built hard drives with high storage capacity, reliability for enterprise-class operations and optimised cost-efficiencies.
Smart video is one of the fastest growing data storage segments today.
The majority of cameras now record in 4K, offering increased frame rates and providing metadata to analyse video in greater detail.
With these enhancements, IT infrastructures need to keep up with these rising demands.
The IDC Global StorageSphere 2023 (Doc #US50673423) confirms this trend, stating that the installed video surveillance storage will grow to 1.18 Zettabyte (ZB) by 2027.
A simple calculation illustrates the storage needs of a smart video system. According to Pro-Vigil, it is advised that a business should install 16 to 64 cameras for complete security – depending on the size of the shop area, its security needs and available budget.
Even if decision-makers opt for the minimum number of cameras (16) with a standard of 24 frame per second (fps) and 60-day data retention, they will need just over 2.4 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity (based on Western Digital’s Surveillance Storage Capacity Estimator Tool).
In other words: 95 26-Terabyte (TB) HDDs to capture, store and analyse all video data.
Taking the growth of AI and the training of AI models that require longer data retention times as well as further increasing resolutions (8K) into consideration, this amount can increase sixfold.
This calculation shows that cost-efficient, high-capacity storage solutions are an absolute necessity for the IT backends of retail shops.
Hard drives in particular are the unsung heroes of any storage infrastructure in this context.
They provide the necessary performance, large capacities and reliability required for 24/7 data capture.
They enable retail shop owners and IT decision makers to easily and cost-effectively upgrade and scale intelligent video solutions, laying the foundation for reliable operations and future business success.
When selecting the right HDDs, it is important to differentiate smart video surveillance drives from conventional HDDs.
The former are purpose-built to support multiple video streams, high “write” workloads and come with firmware that improves streaming by reducing frame loss or dropped frames and enabling 4K recording.
Utilising on-drive intelligence, this new generation of high-capacity smart video HDDs can recognise incoming video stream characteristics and data types, coalesce data together in cache and place data in specific track locations on disk for optimal performance.
These drives also come with capabilities that provide a wealth of storage device parametric operational and diagnostic data to the system.
They can also alert system administrators of specific recommended actions to address potential issues.
This empowers retail shop owners and their IT professionals to better monitor and maintain optimal operations.
The future is wide open; the possibilities for intelligent video in retail are endless.
Data storage is the foundation and is essential for organisations to improve their operations and innovate their shop models into the future.
From 24/7 autonomous micro-stores to interactive showrooms where customers can view physical products but complete the purchase via an app, to virtual try-on shops, smart video technologies with AI-enabled analytics are transforming traditional retail into intelligent, data-driven experiences – and high-capacity HDDs are the enablers for this.
This article was originally published in the June edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.
