I recently stumbled across a company that has created what appears to be a computer vision technology that is capable of detecting shoplifting automatically and alert its users.
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Watching some of the videos and examples provided by the company has left me completely baffled and amazed as to how on earth they may have achieved this functionality.
I understand that no-one here will be able to tell me exactly how this may have been achieved but is anyone aware – and could point me to – research in this field or alternatively perhaps provide details as to how something like this could be implemented or guidance of where one might start?
My understanding was the computer vision algorithms were many years away from being this sophisticated. Is this sort of application really possible? Anyone willing to hazard a guess at how they achieved this?
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You’re misinformed about the state of the art. Several years ago I worked for a company that built such systems for a variety of purposes. One was an extremely successful airport egress-control system, which could easily tell the difference between a person walking the wrong way down the exit hallway and things like balls in motion or people headed the right way. Recognizing objects in a scene in real-time isn’t easy, but we were doing it on embedded CPUs, not on supercomputers.
I didn’t see anything there that wasn’t believable a few years ago.
Actually this company uses a hybrid of computer vision and manual review in India. It is not pure computer vision especially for elements like sweethearting. In fact I know one retailer who has quite a problem with this system not due to the system performance I store but the bandwidth shipping video to India. This manual coding is how they reduce errors and is a typical tech inquest with some vendors now.