I-Corps: Computer Vision for Tracking People in Different Scenarios

在几个购物中心拥有众多商店的大型零售连锁店（例如，Bed，Bath Beyond）可以设计广告活动，在广告活动中，他们在每个商店内展示新商品或特色促销商品，然后奋进评估每个活动的成功。除了跟踪他们的收入，零售商可能会寻求测量每个商店外的流量，进入商店的人的百分比，人们如何在整个商店中移动，在整个商店的每个位置花费的时间等，虽然目前有工具和技术可用于协助这些工作，但它们提供非常粗略的数据，导致未满足的市场需求。今天，红外摄像机被用来解决上述需求，但在他们的估计粗糙。其他现有的解决方案包括安装在特定位置的摄像机以发现商店的给定部分中的人（例如，热区或入口以计数进入的人）。它们也被用来区分不同类型的人（儿童与成人）。但是这些现有的方法和技术是不可靠和不适应的（例如，I-Corps团队正在开发新的技术，以创新的方式满足这一市场需求，使用当今产品中不存在的技术，提供比市场上现有解决方案更准确、更高保真的数据。正在开发的解决方案将易于使用，成本低，可靠。所提出的技术适用于室内和室外数据（考虑到光变化）。为了开发解决方案和商业模式，该团队计划与大型零售店建立关系，以进一步评估他们的需求以及该技术的最佳应用领域。除了零售市场之外，据信拟议的技术将在机场、火车/公共汽车站和所有监控活动中产生商业影响。显然，安全是一个需要这种精确测量人员流动的技术的领域。通过I-Corps团队正在开发的技术，零售商将获得有关其商店内和周围活动的更准确和可靠的数据（例如橱窗营销活动的结果）。这将使他们能够改善商店运营，并为客户提供更好的体验。

A large retail chain with numerous stores in several shopping malls (e.g., Bed, Bath & Beyond) may devise advertising campaigns in which they display new items or feature promotional items within each store, and then endeavor to evaluate the success of each campaign. In addition to tracking their revenues, the retailer may seek to measure traffic outside each store, the percentage of people who enter the store, how people move throughout the store, time spent in each location throughout the store, etc. While there are tools and technologies currently available to assist with these efforts, they provide very crude data, resulting in an unmet market need. Today, infrared cameras are used to address the needs described above, but are crude in their estimates. Other existing solutions include mounted cameras in specific locations to spot people in a given part of the store (e.g., hot zones or entrances to count people entering). They are also used to distinguish different types of people (kids versus adults). But these existing methods and technologies are unreliable and unadaptable (e.g., adjusting to occlusions or changes in natural light over time to get an accurate count), and therefore fail to deliver accurate results to the retail chains.This I-Corps team is developing technology that addresses this market need in new and innovative ways, using technology not present in products today and providing more accurate and higher fidelity data than existing solutions on the market. The solution being developed will be easy to use, low cost, and reliable. The proposed technology is applicable to both indoor and outdoor data (accounting for light variations). To develop the solution and business model, the team plans to establish relationships with large retail stores to further assess their needs and where the technology will be best applied. Beyond the retail market, it is believed that the proposed technology will have commercial impact in airports, train/bus stations, and all surveillance activities. Clearly, security is an area where this technology of accurate measurement of people's movements is necessary. With the technology this I-Corps team is developing, retailers will receive more accurate and reliable data about the activities happening in and around their stores (such as the result of a window marketing campaign). This will enable them to improve store operations and provide better experiences to customers.