Over the years, surveillance systems have gone from being staffed heavily to hardly at all. The latest breed has raised the bar, using cameras with built-in intelligence that are constantly on the watch. Joanna Perry reports

The first CCTV systems had no recording facilities, so the pictures had to be watched live to see what was going on. Today, many systems are left unstaffed and recordings are retrieved only when management is alerted to an incident by other means. But retailers are beginning to benefit from systems that allow the best of both worlds – where the cameras behave more like people, recording what is happening and alerting management if there is footage they need to review.

Loss prevention consultant David Gorman says that traditional analogue CCTV systems – which make up more than 90 per cent of those installed in the UK – require a significant investment in manpower to make the most of them. He says: “Five years ago, we were proud of ourselves for recording everything. The challenge was to work out when something might have happened, so that you could pull out the tape for the right day. But then you had to have someone sit there and watch it all.”

Previously Wal-Mart vice-president of loss prevention, Gorman has 30 years’ experience in the industry and has been chair of the Retail Loss Prevention Council in the US for the past two years. He says that cameras can only take retailers so far on the quest to stamp out loss and businesses should investigate how the latest generation of IP-based network cameras with built-in intelligence can help reduce it further.

Gorman cites studies that show 20 per cent of cameras are not monitored, but believes the figure is actually far higher – probably at least 50 per cent. In any case, he adds, the effectiveness of a dedicated and well-intentioned person deteriorates to well below acceptable levels after only 20 minutes of viewing a screen.

He is excited by the possibilities of modern cameras running intelligent applications. “Systems don’t wear out after 20 minutes; they will tell you every time an incident occurs. They can send real-time event alerts – for instance, if all the razor blades on a display are removed. The system will also send a picture of the person and it can follow them around the store. If you have a good parking-lot system, it will even follow them to their car,” he says.

“You can also use technology to study theft patterns. When you catch them, you have a picture of them, so you can see how they moved around the store and where they did the concealment and you can establish patterns for shoplifting,” says Gorman.

Once behavioural trends are identified, retailers can decide where they should put cameras, signs and public display monitors. He also believes that honest customers do not mind these things being there and, perhaps not surprising given his Wal-Mart past, he adds they expect stores to do it in order to keep prices low.

One IP camera vendor Axis Communications now has more than 500 application development partners signed up, who create software specifically to work with its cameras. In addition, the cameras also have intelligence built in.

For instance, technology advances include active camera tampering, so that if a camera is redirected, blocked, covered, spray-painted or goes out of focus, the camera will send an alert. Effectively, it learns what the picture it is taking should look like and sends an alert if more than a certain percentage of the pixels in the picture change. This can also be used to send an alert if, for instance, someone is lurking near an emergency exit, or if a high-value item is removed from a display.

Other applications provide reporting on integrated surveillance and EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) or EPoS systems and Axis says that application developers are even attempting to build software that can detect sweethearting, when the checkout operator is colluding with the customer and passes items through without scanning them.

And it is not just security that these cameras can help with. For merchandising, networked cameras can monitor dwell time and analyse where customers go, from which retailers can draw up heat maps. Axis says that, while a store manager will usually have a good idea of which aisles are the busiest, this type of intelligence allows them to focus on where people tend to linger within the aisles. The cameras can even detect silent out-of-stocks – when the EPoS system hasn’t registered a sale, so the retailer does not realise that there is no stock on the shelf.

The cost of the many add-on applications that can complement IP cameras is still relatively high, so those retailers that do use them tend to do so in a very targeted way. However, Gorman says that it is still worth investing a little time, to see whether a return on investment could be achieved.

He says: “The challenge for any loss-prevention group is how you sell the programme to management. How much do you know about what you are losing and how can you apply what you think you need to get the best reduction in shrinkage? You have to figure out what is out there and affordable to help with what you want to do.” UK retail has one of the highest loss rates in Europe, so if the numbers stack up anywhere, it should be here.

KEEPING WATCH IN IRELAND
Irish shopping centre Douglas Court has deployed 76 network cameras from Axis Communications to cover the shopping centre, car park and service corridors serving all the retail outlets within the centre.

The scheme is run by Irish retail management company Shipton Group. It sees surveillance as a management tool, not just to cut crime, but to determine customer habits, manage peak periods and ensure health and safety regulations are being properly adhered to.

After trials of various surveillance systems last year, blanket coverage of all internal public areas was put in place during the first half of this year. Douglas Court centre manager Orla Lannin explains that the new system allows guards to track suspects from camera to camera, record them stealing something and then dispatch security to stop them before they leave the centre. And the results have been good. “We have definitely seen a reduction in this sort of crime. In the past, they used to target us in quiet periods, when retail staff tend not to be as alert,” she says.

Lannin is also able to view any incidents that have happened overnight from her computer. She explains: “When I come in, I can see very quickly things that have gone wrong during the night, such as a tenant who has allowed goods to be delivered during the night, but not properly moved these goods away from the service corridors before opening. I can even view a suspect car that cruised around the loading bays for an extended period late at night.”

The system only records two frames per second, but this is all that is needed, because each camera has a wide field of view, so it is not possible to get in or out of the centre without being spotted by at least one camera. This creates good-quality still images for identification and it is possible to store 150 days of recordings.

Shipton Group was particularly keen to store images for a number of months, because Ireland has a high number of personal injury claims and they can be filed up to two years after the incident occurs. For example, now electronic records are kept of when cleaners have been at the scene of a spillage; it is then possible to call up recorded images from nearby cameras to verify that cleaning took place, should someone claim to have slipped as a result of a spillage.

The system can also show where claimants have engineered falls. Lannin explains: “Many claimants give themselves away by falling over in areas where we can clearly see there was no obstruction or spillage whatsoever. Then they get up and often go off and quite happily do their entire week’s shopping before bringing the incident to the attention of staff here. If we can show them doing this on camera, it tends to silence the vast majority very rapidly.”

The centre is also using dedicated cameras for automatic number-plate recognition. The system collects images of the number plate of all vehicles coming in and records the number plate before sending the data via a wireless network to a server. The system creates alerts for management when the car of suspected wrong-doers enters the car park.

In addition to security, these cameras also provide intelligence that complements the people-counting system the centre has installed. Richard Cronin, managing director of Shipton’s IT consultant RPC Consultants, says: “We can now tell how long customers stay. We are able to track a great deal of raw data that can be used to help the centre’s management team.”

In the future, Cronin would like to see greater integration of the different intelligent systems. He concludes: “The real opportunity is in bringing together the intelligence that all these systems provide – automatic number-plate recognition combined with the surveillance cameras and footfall analysis systems. We could even combine all this with weather reports to provide an increasingly comprehensive retail analysis system.”