How people counting can help you optimize your business strategy and protect visitors and customers

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By Yilin Zheng

October 10, 2019

Counting visitors and customers can be a major advantage, helping you serve them better, keep them safe, and even boost sales of your products or services. To help you achieve the commercial or public-service benefits you’re looking for, Hikvision has created our next-generation people counting solution.

The ability to count customers or visitors accurately has huge commercial and safety benefits. It can help to ensure crowd safety in high-traffic-flow areas such as stadiums, for example, as well as ensuring that the number of people entering clubs, exhibition halls and other locations never exceeds fire safety regulations.

What’s more, retailers can also use the technology to increase their success. They can understand, for example, how many customers visit a store or shopping center, which can help hugely with product positioning, merchandizing, and sales. Additionally, store managers can ensure that staff numbers are increased at busy times to serve customers better and keep lines at the checkout as short as possible.

So why isn’t everyone doing it?

The truth of the matter is that people counting is actually pretty hard – especially with traditional video solutions that use single-lens cameras.

This is because single lens cameras have no 3D perspective, which makes it difficult to understand how big an object or person is. This may lead to all kinds of inanimate objects being mistaken for people, from shopping carts to baby carriages. The problem is often made worse when there’s a change in light conditions, and even shadows have contributed to inaccurate people counts in some cases.

How Hikvision solves the problem with dual-lens cameras

To overcome all of these challenges, Hikvision has created our leading people counting solution, which replaces inaccurate single-lens cameras with sophisticated dual-lens cameras. By recording and processing two images of a person concurrently in the same way that human eyes do, our dual-lens cameras produce a high-definition 3D image.

As a result, the solution clearly differentiates people from shadows and other objects, giving you a highly accurate visitor headcount at all times.

Making people counting even smarter

With the problem of inaccurate people counting solved, Hikvision has now made our people counting cameras even smarter. By using an accurate people counting camera, you can understand daily/weekly/monthly peak times, that means you can improve the positioning of fire alarms, checkouts, and even waste bins to make life easier and more convenient for your visitors and customers. You can also take customer footfall into consideration for all your merchandizing decisions, helping you maximize your in-store sales.

Real customer success stories

Hikvision has a growing list of customers who are improving their businesses and customer experiences with our people counting solution.

One example is the Schalwijk Shopping Centre in Haarlem in the Netherlands, which has deployed Hikvision dual-lens DeepinView People Counting cameras (iDS-2CD6820F/C) at all the entrances to the shopping center. The cameras feature binocular stereo vision, 3D people detection and height filtering – all contributing to an amazing accuracy rate of 97%.

As a result, the Schalwijk Shopping Centre now has highly accurate visitor numbers and flow information, which can maximize both customer experience and layout effectiveness. Read the full case study here.

For more information about how Hikvision can help you get highly accurate visitor headcount and achieve all the commercial and safety benefits of people counting, please contact us.

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