RetailOpt: Opt-In, Easy-to-Deploy Trajectory Estimation from Smartphone Motion Data and Retail Facility Information
This addresses the need for easy-to-deploy customer movement tracking in retail for applications like behavior analysis and navigation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods like inertial navigation and optimization.
The paper tackles the problem of tracking customer movements in indoor retail environments by developing RetailOpt, an opt-in system that uses smartphone motion data, store maps, and purchase records to estimate trajectories without additional hardware, achieving effectiveness demonstrated in five diverse environments.
We present RetailOpt, a novel opt-in, easy-to-deploy system for tracking customer movements offline in indoor retail environments. The system uses readily accessible information from customer smartphones and retail apps, including motion data, store maps, and purchase records. This eliminates the need for additional hardware installations/maintenance and ensures customers full data control. Specifically, RetailOpt first uses inertial navigation to recover relative trajectories from smartphone motion data. The store map and purchase records are cross-referenced to identify a list of visited shelves, providing anchors to localize the relative trajectories in a store through continuous and discrete optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in five diverse environments. The system, if successful, would produce accurate customer movement data, essential for a broad range of retail applications including customer behavior analysis and in-store navigation.