A hierarchy-based system for recognizing customer activity in retail environments

Customer activity (CA) in retail environments, which ranges over various shopper situa-tions in store spaces, provides valuable information for store management and marketing planning. Several systems have been proposed for customer activity recognition (CAR) from in-store camera videos, and most of them use machine learning based end-to-end (E2E) CAR models, due to their remarkable performance. Usually, such E2E models are trained for target conditions (i.e., particular CA types in specific store spaces). Accordingly, the existing systems are not malleable to fit the changes in target conditions because they require entire retraining of their specialized E2E models and concurrent use of additional E2E models for new target conditions. This paper proposes a novel CAR system based on a hierarchy that organizes CA types into different levels of abstraction from lowest to highest. The proposed system consists of multiple CAR models, each of which performs CAR tasks that belong to a certain level of the hierarchy on the lower level’s output, and thus conducts CAR for videos through the models level by level. Since these models are separated, this system can deal efficiently with the changes in target conditions by modifying some models individually. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed system in adapting to different target conditions.