Retail store customer behavior analysis system: Design and Implementation

Understanding customer behavior in retail stores plays a crucial role in improving customer satisfaction by adding personalized value to services. Behavior analysis reveals both general and detailed patterns in the interaction of customers with a store items and other people, providing store managers with insight into customer preferences. Several solutions aim to utilize this data by recognizing specific behaviors through statistical visualization. However, current approaches are limited to the analysis of small customer behavior sets, utilizing conventional methods to detect behaviors. They do not use deep learning techniques such as deep neural networks, which are powerful methods in the field of computer vision. Furthermore, these methods provide limited figures when visualizing the behavioral data acquired by the system. In this study, we propose a framework that includes three primary parts: mathematical modeling of customer behaviors, behavior analysis using an efficient deep learning based system, and individual and group behavior visualization. Each module and the entire system were validated using data from actual situations in a retail store.

F2SD: A dataset for end-to-end group detection algorithms

The lack of large-scale datasets has been impeding the advance of deep learning approaches to the problem of F-formation detection. Moreover, most research works on this problem rely on input sensor signals of object location and orientation rather than image signals. To address this, we develop a new, large-scale dataset of simulated images for F-formation detection, called F-formation Simulation Dataset (F2SD). F2SD contains nearly 60,000 images simulated from GTA-5, with bounding boxes and orientation information on images, making it useful for a wide variety of modelling approaches. It is also closer to practical scenarios, where three-dimensional location and orientation information are costly to record. It is challenging to construct such a large-scale simulated dataset while keeping it realistic. Furthermore, the available research utilizes conventional methods to detect groups. They do not detect groups directly from the image. In this work, we propose (1) a large-scale simulation dataset F2SD and a pipeline for F-formation simulation, (2) a first-ever end-to-end baseline model for the task, and experiments on our simulation dataset.