Retail environment
Just Walk Out - slow motion looting or a technological breakthrough in cashless payment?
Online giant Amazon is entering the world of hassle-free physical shopping by allowing people to walk into stores, pick up what they want and leave without paying - seemingly.
While many LP professionals may look upon it as a form of slow motion looting, the Amazon Go grocery store in Seattle is piloting its Just Walk Out technology which on the face of it sounds like a dream come true for shoppers waiting in long lines.
The underlying technology seems to be routed in terra firma, however, with a mixture of cameras, microphones and the massive servers that Amazon uses to run its cloud computing service and power digital assistant Alexa.
The concept promises to let shoppers walk into a store, pick things up, and walk out, thereby skipping the checkout line while everything acquired gets automatically charged to a credit card.
Amazon has refused to comment on the technology behind Amazon Go, but it is believed to be heavy on buzzwords: computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion and a patent filed by the company in 2014 and published in 2015 may shed some light on the process.
It appears to rely on cameras and microphones - lots and lots of them. The tech is similar to what's used to allow self-driving cars to navigate the world.
According to the patent, each customer entering the store would be tagged as they entered. In Amazon's video, they tag their smartphone, which contains the Amazon Go app, as they walk in.
That then allows the store's surveillance system to identify the customer so that it can track them as they move throughout the space. Cameras pick up images of when they stop in front of shelves, what items they picked up and whether the item stayed in their hand or went back to the shelf.
As the patent puts it, "when the user's hand is removed from the inventory location, one or more images may be captured of the user's hand as it exits the inventory location. Those images may be compared to determine whether a user has picked an item from the inventory location or placed an item in the inventory location."
