Aura Vision

Aura Vision is a developer of a consumer insight platform offering in-depth analytics to brick-and-mortar retail stores and malls. The company uses existing security cameras in stores to evaluate and provide detail on customer demographics and behaviors. The platform uses computer vision algorithms to generate the demographics of shoppers in stores. This is all to help retailers increase sales by measuring their customers and stores.

Example of the Insight Platform Dashboard.

The Insight Platform, provided by Aura Vision, is designed to take the data developed from the company's Aura Processing Unit (APU) in order to provide live analytics and comprehensive data visualization tools on a dashboard. This is intended as a decision-support tool, which provides the full customer journey, from every connected location, and from store pass-bys to product engagement and wait times. All of which can be integrated with existing sales data. This also provides age and gender information without facial recognition, done through computer vision technology, which further provides full-location segmentation while protecting the customer privacy.

The platform offers configured email reports for specified team members, such as store managers or retail directors, in order to receive insights every day, week, and month. The platform offers employee-customer segmentation, in order to provide better customer counts and accuracy, and to develop data and related insights into the behavior of employees by location. Besides integrating with sales data, the Insight Platform is capable of integrating with other parts of a business, through an API, which can integrate into a customers preferred business intelligence platform.

The Aura Processing Unit (APU) is an all-in-one computing unit that connects a retail store or shopping area's security cameras to the company's artificial intelligence and Insight Platform. The APU is designed to be low power, and intended to offer plug-and-play usage, requiring users to connect the APU to the internet and in-store security camera systems to begin working. The APU is designed to work with limited bandwidth, needing only 12KB/s per video stream, each of which is processed on-device. Further, the APU supports internet connectivity over ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular connection.

Each APU is capable of understanding more than 2,700 square feet of space from up to five cameras in real time, with Aura Vision working to make the unit cost-effective for a lower cost system for full-location analytics. The APU works with all camera brands capable of supporting RTSP or ONVIF. This includes cameras made from the following manufacturers:

• Aselsan
• Assa Abloy
• Bosch
• Canon
• Alhua Technology
• HIK Vision
• Honeywell
• Motorola
• Panasonic
• TVT
• Tiandy Technologies
• Tyco Security Products
• VIVOTEK
• Zhuhai RaySharp Technology

For retail outlets, Aura Vision's platform works to offer a solution capable of improving productivity per square foot. Through computer vision, this can increase operational efficiency by measuring business critical metrics, such as ensuring there are enough staff on the floor, and by keeping track of the busiest times in-store, including footfall at the entrance to queue times at the till. This can also provide data on where customers spend most of their time during the day, to further ensure staff are where they should be to help drive conversion rates.

Example of the Aura Vision platform and the use of its data.

This data can also be used by retail stores to compare performance metrics across stores to identify ways to drive sales, and to provide customer-specific data to replace products with low impression counts or engagement times to increase dwell time and boost conversion. Furthermore, the data generated from Aura Vision's platform can allow retailers to localize digital and in-store campaigns to better target customer demographics and use digital displays dynamically to drive traffic by location. This can include shopper demographics to understand which customers are most likely to convert sales.

For malls, and similar shopping centers, Aura Vision offers its platform as a solution to understand which retailers in a mall are driving the most traffic to help influence rental pricing. This includes using Aura Vision's platform to precisely measure customer footfall and demographics to further inform tenancy decisions, and to see which retailers are doing best at driving traffic into their stores and how this compares with larger demographics.

Further, the platform can be used to help malls measure experiential performance in order to gain data on dwell time and engagement across in-mall experiences. The platform is also capable of recording metrics on the impact of a mall-wide marketing campaign, which can be shared with tenants. And the platform can provide malls with detailed flow heatmaps and hotspots to show users how different types of customers move around common areas and create new opportunities for tenants to engage customers, and to dynamically price rentals per traffic flow.

Especially for COVID-19, Aura Vision offers its platform for an in-store safety solution. The platform can provide live queue times and store capacity to ensure customers are safe to enter or visit a store, and determine which times are most challenging for maintaining employee and customer safety. It can provide metrics on the compliance of staff and customers with government regulations by region on PPE guidance. Similarly, the platform can provide a sanitization prioritization based on a heatmap of which areas have been visited most regularly, and develop area priority rankings for staff to know where to sanitize first, and most often.

Example of the Aura Vision platform noticing overcrowding and potential traffic flow risks.

The platform is also capable of providing users with social distancing alerts to understand in real time when customers or staff members are within 6 feet or 2 meters of each other. It can also identify overcrowding by area and better inform customer path flow and related management. The platform can also be used to understand traffic flow compliance, and which management policies are most effective at guiding customers around the store. It can also count how many customers are moving contra-flow to one-way directional systems for better overall customer experience.