A team of developers atKimetric (Buenos Aires City, Argentina) have created a system for retailers that can help them understand their customers' behavior within their stores and measure the effectiveness of indoor marketing campaigns.
Using Kinect 3-D sensors, the system measures store traffic and gathers information about the actions of the customers throughout the purchasing process, from the window of the shop to the checkout counter.
What is more, due to the system's anonymous facial recognition system and skeletal tracking ability, the Kimetric system can determine the gender, age, height and size of customers too. The company claims that it is accurate enough to differentiate between five age categories for each gender: children, teens, young adults, adults, and seniors.
The system also performs eye tracking and hand tracking to detect what a customer is looking at or pointing at. This makes it easier for retailers to understand what products are more popular than others. If a customer is interested enough to pick up a product, the Kimetric system then shows more information about it on the LCD display.
Moreover, Kimetric tracks up to four different moods: happy, angry, sad, and surprised to enable retailers to analyze consumer reaction to marketing campaigns and products.
All the statistically information collected by the system is collated and presented to a retailer on a website where it can be analyzed further.
On a related note, Microsoft (Redmond, WA, USA) has announced that Kinect for Windows will be available in China next month. Kinect for Windows hardware will also be available in Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Puerto Rico later this fall.
October will also see Microsoft releasing an update to the Kinect for Windows runtime and software development kit (SDK). The update will include support for Windows 8 desktop applications, Microsoft .NET 4.5, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2012.
Recent articles on the Microsoft Kinect from Vision Systems Design.
1.How accurate is the Kinect?
An assistant professor at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands) has written a technical paper that analyses the accuracy and resolution of the depth data from the Microsoft Kinect sensor.
2.Free toolkit helps Labview developers interface to the Kinect
Researchers from the school of mechanical engineering at Leeds University (Leeds, UK) have been crowned winners of the Student Design Competition at National Instruments NI Week in Austin, Texas for creating a LabVIEW application programming interface (API) for Microsoft's Kinect software development toolkit (SDK).
3.Kinect could help medics estimate radiation dose from CT scanner
Researchers at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania are investigating whether a system based around the Microsoft Kinect could be used to help predict the precise dose of ionizing radiation that patients require during a CT scan by providing an accurate estimate of whole-body volume.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor,Vision Systems Design
