Sentiment analysis in the retail industry becomes more accessible
The Challenge
Brands need to understand their customers on a deeper level. Therefore, they employ market analysts to measure consumer preferences – the better the data, the better the insights. Passive solutions such as facial analysis sit on the cutting edge of AI and provide rich information. But they comprise many bits and pieces, making them hard to deploy in stores. Moreover, brands operate under continuous changes in merchandise display, floorplan layout, audience demographics, and regional trends. Flexibility and constant monitoring are critical but hard to achieve.
A computer vision application requires high-resolution cameras (the eyes), strong computer processors to run powerful AI models (the brain), and an easy-to-use interface to summarize the results. These are a lot of specialized pieces that need to fit together for the application to work as expected. Zenus and Seeed came together to provide an all-in-one solution powered by the NVIDIA Jetson to simplify the process and fulfill your needs.
The Solution
Picture a smart device that connects to any camera and processes the video feed. All you need to do is power up the unit, and it works instantly.
The device sends the meta-data to the cloud to generate actionable reports. You have access to real-time metrics such as foot traffic, demographics, sentiment analysis, and more. – all ethically sourced and displayed live on an interactive dashboard.
The benefits? Foot traffic information is used to compute conversion rates and predict sales. Demographics data help companies understand whether they reach their target audience while being more inclusive and personal. Sentiment analysis allows them to see what works and why.
It is the first time that marketers have access to a complete sales funnel that helps them understand consumer behavior in physical spaces. The data may also be used to predict and estimate future performance.
NVIDIA: Edge Computing
People often think of massive data centers processing dozens of video feeds. But in the past few years, companies such as NVIDIA have brought this power to the edge. The creation of NVIDIA-Certified Systems, embedded platforms, AI software, and management services have allowed enterprises to harness the power of AI at the edge quickly.
NVIDIA Jetson is a complete System on Module (SOM), including CPU, GPU, memory, power management, high-speed interfaces, and more. Jetson modules fit into the neat little devices that analyze high-resolution video without sending footage to the cloud. Jetson modules reduce bandwidth and cloud costs by orders of magnitudes and deliver high performance with excellent efficiency.
Zenus: Artificial Intelligence
Zenus is an Austin, Texas startup that offers a fully-integrated solution. They packaged powerful AI models into a smart device powered by NVIDIA SoMs.
Zenus leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence to create incredible products while driving the ethical use of facial analysis. Their proprietary technology produces heatmaps and measures engagement without risk of data theft or personal identification, providing safe data capture of consumer behavior for the 21.7 trillion dollars in-store retail market.
Consumer brands and business events use their plug-and-play analytics to understand people’s behavior in any physical space. There are dozens of applications that have achieved success, with more to come in the near future.
Seeed: Striving To Be the Most Reliable Hardware Platform Enabling Developers to Digitize Industries
Seeed Studio is a proud partner to Zenus, and we are working together to offer off-the-shelf, fully integrated solutions. Seeed supports the Zenus AI camera with the newest Seeed A206 carrier board. It is a high-performance, interface-rich NVIDIA Jetson Nano/Xavier NX/TX2 NX compatible carrier board.
The board provides HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, M.2 key E wifi / BT, M.2 key M, CSI camera, RS232, CAN, PIO, I2C, I2S fans, and other rich peripheral interfaces, which are compatible with multiple NVIDIA SoMs and offer a wide variety of options and flexibility.
So how does A206 support Zenus’ smart camera?
A206 allows the Zenus smart devices to capture high-quality images for processing by the NVIDIA SoMs via CSI, USB, and other standard interfaces. The combination facilitates advanced facial analysis on edge to deliver valuable insights into consumer behavior.
If you are interested in receiving an out-of-the-box solution for your business, please contact [email protected] or [email protected] to learn more.
Seeed & NVIDIA
At Seeed, you will find everything you need for the NVIDIA Jetson Platform – official NVIDIA Jetson Dev Kits, Seeed-designed carrier boards, and kits, as well as third-party boards and accessories.
Your open-source hardware-based agile manufacturing partner:
Seeed offers customization and turn-key services, providing a robust and well-established process to bring your product to market with the right materials and quality ensured. We offer:
- CUSTOMIZATION: One-stop customization service based on Single Board Computers to shorten the path from technology to application
- MANUFACTURING: Turn-key service ranging from prototyping and mass production, backed by the reliable supply chain resources in Shenzhen
- DISTRIBUTION: We help our customers promote their products with our global sales channels
End-to-end deployable solutions align with Seeed Partners.
Utilizing our decade-plus expertise, we hope to enable more possibilities on ML/AI verticals aligning with more software and service partners. We have been working on the Jetson product line for a couple of years and have designed our carrier boards, such as Jetson Mate, which you can also find in the official NVIDIA Store. Seeed will continue working on the Jetson product line and will be ready to combine our partners’ unique skills with Seeed’s hardware expertise for an end-to-end solution.
We work closely with cloud services, ISVs, PssS, software design providers, and system integrators to deliver end-to-end and deployable solutions for scale.
About Author
