NVIDIA Tackles Retail Shrinkage

Retailers are struggling more than ever with “shrinkage,” the loss of goods due to theft, damage, and misplacement, and it is hitting the retail industry where it hurts the most. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2022 Retail Security Survey, conducted in partnership with the Loss Prevention Research Council, the retail industry is trying to address a $100 billion problem, with an estimated 65 percent due to theft. Many retailers are reporting theft has more than doubled recently, driven by rising prices of food and other essentials.

Retailers are struggling more than ever with “shrinkage,” the loss of goods due to theft, damage, and misplacement, and it is hitting the retail industry where it hurts the most. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2022 Retail Security Survey, conducted in partnership with the Loss Prevention Research Council, the retail industry is trying to address a $100 billion problem, with an estimated 65 percent due to theft. Many retailers are reporting theft has more than doubled recently, driven by rising prices of food and other essentials.

However, developers can build loss-prevention applications using NVIDIA Retail AI Workflows. The workflows are built on NVIDIA Metropolis Microservices, a low- or no-code way of building AI applications. The microservices provide the building blocks for developing complex AI workflows and allow them to scale into production-ready AI apps rapidly.

Retail AI Workflows designed to prevent loss

NVIDIA announced three Retail AI Workflows to help developers quickly build and roll out applications designed to prevent theft. The no-code or low-code building blocks for loss-prevention applications come pre-trained with images of the most-stolen products and software to plug into existing store applications for point-of-sale machines and object and product tracking storewide.

According to Read Hayes, director of the Loss Prevention Research Council:

“Retail theft is growing due to macro-dynamics and threatens to overwhelm the industry. Businesses now face the reality that investment in loss-prevention solutions is a critical requirement.”

The NVIDIA Retail AI Workflows are available through the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite and include the following:

• Retail Loss Prevention AI Workflow: The AI models in this workflow come pre-trained to recognize hundreds of products most frequently lost to theft, including meat, alcohol, and laundry detergent. The models are also pre-trained to recognize them in the varying sizes and shapes offered. Retailers and independent software vendors can customize and further train the models to include hundreds of thousands of store products using synthetic data generation from NVIDIA Omniverse. The workflow is a state-of-the-art few-shot learning technique developed by NVIDIA Research. Combined with active learning, it identifies and captures new products scanned by customers and sales associates during checkout to improve model accuracy.
• Multi-Camera Tracking AI Workflow: This workflow delivers multi-target, multi-camera (MTMC) capabilities that allow application developers to more easily create systems that track objects across multiple cameras throughout the store. The workflow tracks objects and associates across cameras and maintains a unique ID for each object. Objects are tracked through visual embeddings or appearance rather than personal biometric information to maintain complete shopper privacy.
• Retail Store Analytics Workflow: Uses computer vision to provide insights for store analytics, such as store traffic trends, counts of customers with shopping baskets, aisle occupancy, and more via custom dashboards.

Integrate your models

According to NVIDIA, developers can easily customize and extend these AI workflows by integrating their models. The microservices also make it easier to integrate new offerings with legacy systems, such as point-of-sale systems.

Bobby Chowdary, chief technology officer at Radis.ai, said:

“NVIDIA’s new Retail AI Workflows built on Metropolis Microservices allow us to customize our product, scale rapidly to fit our ever-growing customers’ needs better and continue to drive innovation in the retail space.

Infosys is also developing state-of-the-art loss prevention systems leveraging NVIDIA’s workflows to help them deploy solutions faster and scale across stores and product lines.

NVIDIA Retail Solutions

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