HPCwire: A New Business Intelligence Tool for Retailers

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Industry >> Retail

January 14, 2009

A New Business Intelligence Tool for Retailers

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

With retail sales in their biggest slump since record-keeping began in 1992, businesses are desperately looking for ways to boost the bottom line. Improving productivity in existing stores with technologies like video analytics may turn out to be one of the most effective ways to accomplish this.

Sophisticated video analytics can help businesses assess shopping behavior by tracking customer behavior in aggregate and building up a repository of historical data. The information retailers are interested in has to do with where people are spending their time in the store, the effectiveness of store advertising displays, the demographics of visitors, and just generally how customer traffic is flowing through the store. The idea is to help retailers increase revenue and store productivity by optimizing merchandise choices and placement.

In the past, retailers convinced random customers to carry around tracking devices, so their shopping activities could be monitored. But this only provided a qualitative view of shopper behavior. Video analytics promises a quantitative view. For the most part, these analytics systems use video feeds from existing security cameras. But whereas the security video is mostly being examined manually -- either in real time or as a result of some past mischief -- video analytics can repurpose that same data stream to provide business intelligence for improving store operations.

Canadian startup LightHaus Logic is one of the pioneers in this area, providing high-performance video analytics applications for a variety of commercial settings. This week the company introduced Equinox Visual Intelligence solutions for the retail industry, which are currently under trial by a number of top retailers.

The LightHaus system distills terabytes of digitized video data into graphics-based reports that encapsulate customer activity over some a period of time. It aggregates a variety of information, such as the number of people at certain locations in the store and if they are standing still or moving (and in what direction). The system can also gather more specific information like effectiveness of the coveted end-of-aisle displays -- the so-called "end-cap" displays. More sophisticated analytics, like identifying a shopper's age, gender and ethnicity, can also be obtained in order to determine demographic shopping preferences.

Being able to condense hundreds or thousands of hours of video into actionable intelligence is the goal. "You don't want to look at a month of video from several cameras," explains Mario Palumbo, chief technology officer at LightHaus Logic. "You'd like a snapshot that shows you the whole story."

The LightHaus offering uses a proprietary video gateway appliance and compute-intensive image processing software to convert the digitized video data into "metadata" that encapsulates customer activity in the store. The trick is processing multiple video feeds in real time. Because of the nature of the application, the hardware's pedigree is from the embedded world, where real-time signal processing is a common type of workload. The LightHaus gateway appliance is a 1U box and uses multiple processors (general purpose CPUs and/or FPGAs) connected via PCIe or Ethernet links. An external disk is used for local storage of video and metadata.

Depending upon the resolution of the video feeds and the different types of analysis being run (occupancy numbers, demographics, display effectiveness, etc.), a single appliance will typically handle between five to 20 video streams. For large setups, multiple appliances can be hooked together. In this case the software auto-detects the other LightHaus boxes and one of them gets arbitrarily assigned to be the head node.

A certain amount of configuration is needed to set up system parameters like store layout and types of analysis. Palumbo says they try to make the configuration setup as easy as possible, since retailers typically don't have a great deal of IT expertise. A lot of the larger operations like Home Depot and Wal-Mart employ system integrators to manage computer and video infrastructure, and these subcontractors would end up doing the configuration.

The most user-friendly part of the system is the report and data mining tools. The analytics-derived metadata is presented to the retailer in graphs and tables, with additional functionality provided for examining real-time and historical data. The whole system can be accessed via a standard Web browser interface, either locally or remotely. This allows large retailers to slice and dice the data produced from multiple stores and access it from any location.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Cisco Containers Target Federal Market

Mar 15 | Data Center Knowledge | Company delivers UCS-container solution to NASA. Read more...

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html