Retail Security: Intelligent Video

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As brick and mortar companies continue to drive the level of competition up in the retail market space as they compete against online companies offering free shipping and very low prices, they must seek every possible advantage so as to grow their revenues while still addressing conventional security threats such as inventory loss through internal and external theft, also known as “shrinkage”.

Fortunately for those working in a retail space, the security industry has developed products allowing for greatly enhanced security in addition to a whole range of features that are useful in tracking customers and streamlining various processes. There are five key areas associated with the concept of “Intelligent Video”: People counting, traffic pattern analysis, customer satisfaction, the reduction of theft, and monitoring the exterior. Here we will look at these aspects of “Intelligent Video”, more commonly known as analytics enhanced video surveillance.

Unlike a company that operates strictly online, traditional storefronts have a difficult time determining just how many people visited their location each day. Counting visitors can enhance efficiency and make it easier to make decisions which could affect conversion rates and per-customer transactions. Cameras at the entrance should use WDR or “Wide Dynamic Range” so as to bring the clearest images to the analytics software.

Using analytics to monitor and analyze traffic patterns can involve heat mapping, which visually shows a hot and cold flow on screen based on customer flow. Regional people counting analysis helps show how people move through the store. Data like this can be used in determining where to place products, how high on the shelf, and etc. This software can also show how much visitors look at any particular display. Ultimately, all this data can be combined to get a very clear picture of what your customers do on average, and therefore what your best options are for the store.

As far as improving customer satisfaction goes, it simply follows from the implementation of the aforementioned changes based on analytics information. Line times can be reduced or eliminated in the store. On a broad scale, analytics will determine how many people to bring onto staff on any given day and what hours they should work. HD cameras can also be used to individually capture transactions at the register.

As for reducing theft, a wide range of options is available. IR cameras for very low light areas to motion detection or more advanced tech such as tripwire or removed object analysis will enhance the overall effectiveness in managing inventory and reducing theft. PTZ (Pan, Tilt, Zoom) cameras are useful in monitoring the exterior of the building. Having a camera for every corner and corridor also eliminates the possibility of false injury claims and confirms facts in the case of a burglary.

Security Technology offers the integration of security solutions such as these, along with analytics to get the best overall picture of what goes on in your storefront.

Please contact us through email at admin@gostst.com on our website or via phone at  210-446-4863   24/7

Sources: Security Today Magazine

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CheckVideo: Solving Summertime Pool Trespassing

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Many apartments, condominium communities, and neighborhoods have community pools, often attached to a gym, sauna, or other such facilities. These areas can be a major source of liability for the HOAs that maintain them, and although they are generally locked in some way with a set of posted hours, trespassing is still common. There is a reason that so many of the videos demonstrating security products feature a clip of a pool break-in being foiled, that reason being the unusually high prevalence of trespassing. While there are a number of possible ways to tackle this issue, with varying degrees of success, here we will look at a solution that we recommend and have implemented in these settings before using gear from CheckVideo.

CheckVideo is a cloud based video hosting and monitoring system using off-site cloud storage. Using one or more cameras and motion detectors, a CheckVideo system is able to function during the day as general surveillance, providing the increasingly industry standard ability to check in on the property from a mobile device, while during closing hours operating as an alarm system with the capability to implement a siren or to quietly transmit footage to a monitoring center which can dispatch police if necessary.

CheckVideo features the same kind of analytics which are commonly employed in environments such as car lots, with software able to distinguish between a human presence and an animal, shadow moving, or other false alarm material. The system highlights human faces with a digital box and pushes that video to the phone of the user. It is a combination of analytics, the accessibility of mobile device connectivity, as well as the scalability of a CheckVideo system that makes it such a good fit for semi-public areas such as pools.

Finally, a unique feature for actually searching through your recordings is available in the app. It follows a format where the search parameters “what, where, and when” can be used to narrow down your search if there is a particular event that you are trying to locate. CheckVideo allows, for instance, a search for a “person”, in the “main entrance” between the hours of “X and Y”, which is really quite a next-gen way of going about cloud-hosted video storage and monitoring.

With no servers or on-site software needed, the ability to upgrade and integrate with existing cameras, as well as its overall usability and unique features make CheckVideo an ideal solution for security issues both great and small.

Security Technology of South is proud to offer integration of this service and custom solutions for any and all security needs. Please contact us through email at admin@gostst.com on our website or via phone at  210-446-4863   24/7

Loss Prevention and Evidence Gathering

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Geovision’s GV-VMS integrates with existing Windows-based POS consoles. This allows for the transactions made at the POS machines to automatically embed into recorded video and sync with the cloud. Transactions are keyword searchable and suspicious transactions can generate automatic notifications. Read more

The Future of Biometrics

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In computer science, there exists a mathematical idea known as “Moore’s Law”. This law describes an exponential relationship between time into the future and, essentially, the number of logic gates that we can fit on a silicon chip. It also relates to how much smaller our processors have gotten over time and it is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

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