The surveillance cameras at Big Y, a Massachusetts grocery chain, don’t just passively record customers and staff.
They study checkout lines for signs of “sweethearting,” when cashiers use subtle tricks to pass free goods to friends: obscuring the bar code, slipping an item behind the scanner, passing two items at a time but charging for one.
Mathematical algorithms in the security system pick out sweethearting on their own. There’s no need for a security guard watching banks of monitors or reviewing hours of footage. When the system thinks it has spotted evidence, it alerts management.
Mark Gaudette, Big Y’s head of loss prevention, said he expects to save up to $3 million a year.
The possibilities have the ring of science fiction. Think of systems that spot abandoned packages on a train platform or alert an airline crew to a potential terrorist on board.
But just how smart have these cameras really become? “Some of the claims that are made are just ridiculous,” says Oliver Vellacott, chief executive of IndigoVision, a British company that makes video-analysis technology. “That you’re going to spot suspicious behavior in people about to stab someone on the street.”
