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In the current information era, customer analytics play a key role in the success of any business. Since customer demographics primarily dictate their preferences, identification and utilization of age & gender information of customers in sales forecasting, may maximize retail sales. In this work, we propose a computer vision based approach to age and gender prediction in surveillance video. The proposed approach leverage the effectiveness of Wide Residual Networks and Xception deep learning models to predict age and gender demographics of the consumers. The proposed approach is designed to work with raw video captured in a typical CCTV video surveillance system. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on real-life garment store surveillance video, which is captured by low resolution camera, under non-uniform illumination, with occlusions due to crowding, and environmental noise. The system can also detect customer facial expressions during purchase in addition to demographics, that can be utilized to devise effective marketing strategies for their customer base, to maximize sales.

The analysis of sales information, is a vital step in designing an effective marketing strategy. This work proposes a novel approach to analyse the shopping behaviour of customers to identify their purchase patterns. An extended version of the Multi-Cluster Overlapping k-Means Extension (MCOKE) algorithm with weighted k-Means algorithm is utilized to map customers to the garments of interest. The age & gender traits of the customer; the time spent and the expressions exhibited while selecting garments for purchase, are utilized to associate a customer or a group of customers to a garments they are interested in. Such study on the customer base of a retail business, may help in inferring the products of interest of their consumers, and enable them in developing effective business strategies, thus ensuring customer satisfaction, loyalty, increased sales and profits.

One of the basic requirements of humans is clothing and this approach aims to identify the garments selected by customer during shopping, from surveillance video. The existing approaches to detect garments were developed on western wear using datasets of western clothing. They do not address Indian garments due to the increased complexity. In this work, we propose a computer vision based framework to address this problem through video surveillance. The proposed framework uses the Mixture of Gaussians background subtraction algorithm to identify the foreground present in a video frame. The visual information present in this foreground is analysed using computer vision techniques such as image segmentation to detect the various garments, the customer is interested in. The framework was tested on a dataset, that comprises of CCTV videos from a garments store. When presented with raw surveillance footage, the proposed framework demonstrated its effectiveness in detecting the interest of customer in choosing their garments by achieving a high precision and recall.

The use of facial masks in public spaces has become a social obligation since the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic and the identification of facial masks can be imperative to ensure public safety. Detection of facial masks in video footages is a challenging task primarily due to the fact that the masks themselves behave as occlusions to face detection algorithms due to the absence of facial landmarks in the masked regions. In this work, we propose an approach for detecting facial masks in videos using deep learning. The proposed framework capitalizes on the MTCNN face detection model to identify the faces and their corresponding facial landmarks present in the video frame. These facial images and cues are then processed by a neoteric classifier that utilises the MobileNetV2 architecture as an object detector for identifying masked regions. The proposed framework was tested on a dataset which is a collection of videos capturing the movement of people in public spaces while complying with COVID-19 safety protocols. The proposed methodology demonstrated its effectiveness in detecting facial masks by achieving high precision, recall, and accuracy., Comment: Contains 6 pages and 6 figures. Published in 12th CICN 2020

The practice of social distancing is imperative to curbing the spread of contagious diseases and has been globally adopted as a non-pharmaceutical prevention measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. This work proposes a novel framework named SD-Measure for detecting social distancing from video footages. The proposed framework leverages the Mask R-CNN deep neural network to detect people in a video frame. To consistently identify whether social distancing is practiced during the interaction between people, a centroid tracking algorithm is utilised to track the subjects over the course of the footage. With the aid of authentic algorithms for approximating the distance of people from the camera and between themselves, we determine whether the social distancing guidelines are being adhered to. The framework attained a high accuracy value in conjunction with a low false alarm rate when tested on Custom Video Footage Dataset (CVFD) and Custom Personal Images Dataset (CPID), where it manifested its effectiveness in determining whether social distancing guidelines were practiced., Comment: Contains 6 pages & 7 figures. Published in 12th CICN 2020