Experiment #205 Applied Artificial Intelligence, the real one ??
Introduction
For many people, artificial intelligence is something reserved. And for few, a future that is yet to come. But the reality is different, since we can see around us a huge number of examples where artificial intelligence is part of our daily lives. Who has not seen a series in Netflix or booked a hotel room in Booking suggested by the product recommender? Or even used Google to search the internet.
On the other hand, as subject matter experts, we are used to companies and large organizations that do not take full advantage of their data, since data is, without a doubt, ‘the new oil’. Extracting data and making the most out of it is a complex task but, if done in the right way, the return on investment is more than guaranteed.
Today we will focus on unraveling a system capable of tracing the patterns that people follow at a shopping center; analyzing their feelings at the arrival and departure, whether they go to the fitting room, buy something and much more. This procedure is carried out with Azure and the results are shown in Power BI.
Description of the system
Data from the shopping center`s security cameras are rarely exploited. Thanks to advances in technology, we can study our consumers, not only when they interact through our e-commerce platforms but also in the shops.
The system will answer the following questions:
- How many people have entered the shop?
- How long have they stayed inside?
- Which departments has the person visited?
- How much time has the person spent in each department?
- Has the person been in the fitting room?
- Has the person bought anything?
- How long has the person been queuing to pay?
- What is the person’s feeling (positive/negative, maybe surprise at a price, etc.) throughout the visit to the shop?
- Which parts of the store are most often visited?
- Which bags does the person have?
Architecture
The simplified architecture to meet all the needs and answer the previous questions would be this one:
We would start from the base of having n number of shops. Each shop would have several security cameras that will be used to trace the patterns and routes of each person.
At the shop’s closing time (although it could also be done in real time), all the data stored by the security cameras would be sent to Azure’s services for further analysis.
Let’s see it in detail:
Each shop will have a database where the different data generated throughout the day will be stored. At the end of the day, an automatic process will send the images captured by the cameras to be analyzed in Azure. In order to meet the business needs, the Face and Computer Vision tools will be used to answer all the target questions that were raised before.
Finally, all the data generated by Azure Cognitive Services will be stored in an Azure SQL Server in PaaS, for later analysis in Power BI and, thus, making it available for the analysis department.
Organization of each shop
Each store will need to be divided into n number of areas so that we can draw a later analysis focused on the desired direction.
For example, in a shop like this:
The cameras would need to be strategically placed in order to visualize the shop’s:
- Aisles
- Entry and exit of the shop
- Entry and exit of the fitting rooms
- Cash desks
In addition, the shop needs to be also divided into different areas, for example, in red, green and blue zones, that may correspond to men’s, women’s and children’s departments. Like this:
Read more of Experiment #205 here.
