Analysis of shopping behavior based on surveillance system

Closed Circuit Television systems in shopping malls could be used to monitor the shopping behavior of people. From the tracked path, features can be extracted such as the relation with the shopping area, the orientation of the head, speed of walking and direction, pauses which are supposed to be related to the interest of the shopper. Once the interest has been detected the next step is to assess the shopper´s positive or negative appreciation to the focused products by analyzing the (non-verbal) behavior of the shopper. Ultimately the system goal is to assess the opportunities for selling, by detecting if a customer needs support. In this paper we present our methodology towards developing such a system consisting of participating observation, designing shopping behavioral models, assessing the associated features and analyzing the underlying technology. In order to validate our observations we made recordings in our shop lab. Next we describe the used tracking technology and the results from experiments.