Explained: The industry shaping applications of AI-powered People Tracking solutions

People Counting, Tracking, and Characterization are becoming more and more prevalent in various industries across the globe. It is simply a branch of a Computer Vision solution known as Object Detection and classification. This Machine Learning powered process is widely used for tracking customer traffic and managing resources at workplaces.
Industry shaping applications of AI-powered People Tracking

People Counting, Tracking, and Characterization are becoming more and more prevalent in various industries across the globe. It is simply a branch of a Computer Vision solution known as Object Detection and classification. This Machine Learning powered process is widely used for tracking customer traffic and managing resources at workplaces. The primary applications of People Tracking and Characterization can be broken down into:

  • Statistical Data: Track and collect data on visitor footfall and visitor’s demographic profile
  • Market Research: Analyze customer experience, Queue Wait-Time and time spent by visitors in different areas of a showroom or shop
  • Operational insights: You can also mine insights by tracking the arrival pattern of people and improve the People count v/s Capacity management
  • Workplace Management: Analyze how your staff is operating, surveil workstation presence and improve efficiency
  • Attendance: Track ‘IN’ and ‘OUT’ of your staff, register attendance for students
  • Distinguish: Object detection and characterization helps in distinguishing between different entities like staff and visitor, authorized and unauthorized personnel 
  • Security: Characterization features help your systems detect unauthorized or unsafe presence in a given area. As a result, People Tracking and Characterization are heavily used for increased surveillance.

DECODED: The process of Tracking and Characterization 

  1. The first part of the process includes creating a scope of vision. For this a bounding box is created. If there are different objects in the background with different characteristics, separate bounding boxes are created; for example, staff and visitors in a shop will have separate bounding boxes.
  2. After a bounding box is established, label annotations come into play. In this step, different entities are annotated accordingly. For example, all employees in a shop will have uniforms, and this feature can be used to annotate the employees and separate them from customers. The model will then mark employees as ‘emp’ and customers as ‘cst.’
  3. The next part involves creating neural networks with thousands of images and data sets. 
  4. The last part is testing. The industry average for train:testing ratio comes around 80:20. That means for every 8 images used for training the model, 2 images will be used to test the model.
  5. Talking about the models, the market leaders include Yolo and MobileNet SSD. These models use PyTorch frameworks to read through data sets and come up with characterizations, categorizations, and deep insights too.

How People Tracking and Characterization is changing our world

People Tracking and characterization is a very revolutionary solution for businesses, retail shops, organizations, and even educational institutions. Large-scale grocery shops with acres of lanes are the perfect candidate to benefit immensely from this technology. These shops can manage shift timings and use their resources wisely for the busiest hours of the day. They can also strategically place the best-selling items in areas receiving less footfall and vice versa. On the other hand, small to mid-size retail shops are heavily using a variant of this solution known as Out-Of-Stock solutions to place products on shelves strategically. Furthermore, this solution helps shops distinguish between their employees and visitors, hence preventing incorrect metrics.

Apart from shops and retailers, organizations and corporations stand as the biggest benefactor of this technology. Optimizing workplace and employee efficiency is a continuous process for every organization. One way of doing it is by using Employee Tracking solutions to streamline the process, save time and cut costs. Employee Tracking Solutions save a lot of time by regularizing attendance and ensuring all workstations have the designated workforce. They also increase security by categorizing authorized and unauthorized personnel in different areas.

The potential this solution holds is even more impressive. Be it in educational institutions, polling stations for elections, or using it to follow social distancing and COVID norms, this solution is making its way into every sphere.

Visionify.ai is a Computer Vision solutions provider that has deployed AI/ML/CV-based solutions across industries. You can chat with our team to get a demo of our People Detection and Tracking solutions and learn how you can incorporate it into your production process to achieve the best results.