“Big Data” was a hot topic for businesses and their IT operations last year. While Big Data is not going to be a mainstream concept for retail video surveillance this year, IMS Research (now part of IHS Inc.) predicts in its annual video surveillance trends that the use and aggregation of analytics and video feed metadata as Big Data will continue to grow, and that retailers as well as other businesses looking to utilize Big Data will increasingly look at the potential to incorporate video feed metadata streams into their data sets while leveraging the approach across security and the business as a whole.
Already, there are a few third-party firms serving retail establishments and who analyze security video feeds as well as other data – Big Data -- for typical and unique conclusions. In some leading edge cases, there now are more detailed detection and analytics of in-store traffic. Among examples: