Video Analytic SaaS to target Sweethearting

ASIS's Security Management magazine has profiled a company, StopLift, providing a video analytic managed service that aims to reduce losses from sweethearting. The article cites $3 Million in cost savings over 9 month deployment at supermarket chain Big Y [link no longer available].

According to the article, StopLift, requires the addition of (a) cameras directly overhead of registers and (b) a video analytic appliance that connects to existing DVRs. Additionally, integration with a PoS system is presumed. Each day, a set of suspicious events is transferred to StopLift's monitoring service where humans review each event to determine if it is a valid loss event.

The store reports that it found some of the loss due to theft but other to procedural errors and a malfunction in the PoS software. The store claims that since the introduction of the system "verified incidents of sweethearting and accidental error are down 86 percent. "

We believe the use of human monitors to review events is a critical element in the operation of a video analytics based sweetheart reduction system. As the article implies, sweethearting attempts are often too subtle to reliably to be caught automatically. The use of outsourced human monitoring compensates for this deficiency and provides more accurate results for the security managers.

Contrast to Agilence who also provides a monitored service for retailers looking to reduce shrink.

Update 2012: See our in depth review of StopLift.