Shrink itself isn’t just the associated financial loss of the merchandise; it’s hours wasted reviewing endless CCTV footage, frustrating customers with locked display cases, and the hit to customer satisfaction if an innocent shopper gets stopped. For store operations and loss prevention teams, shrink means inconvenience, lost productivity, and squeezed margins, with many retailers planning on 6%-8% of sales getting lost from every self-checkout lane. As a result, Trigo has been focused on how AI can create better shopping experiences and create opportunities to reclaim lost sales or increase store throughput.
Trigo has been working on digitizing physical spaces for several years using advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence. The challenges of uniting a physical space with a digital experience are as wide as the behavior of shoppers that the platform is meant to support. Add to that the need to protect customer privacy and you can quickly see that a retail-specific approach is necessary. By tackling our autonomous store platform first, EasyOut®, we’ve managed to unlock powerful insights advancing computer vision and AI in the retail space while opening other possibilities like a new approach to loss prevention.
Proven Expertise: The Autonomous Store: EasyOut® Foundation
At Trigo, our expertise comes from years of developing our EasyOut® stores, fully automated environments where checkout lines vanish, basket sizes are bigger, and every shopper’s journey is effortless and anonymous. Central to the technology is our calibrated 3D camera space, optimized for both high-accuracy tracking even in crowded checkout zones and running AI-in-the-wild computer vision algorithms for shelf interaction scene understanding. Shoppers are anonymously tracked using 3D key-points (“stick figures”), enabling action-recognition models that identify shelf interactions, such as item take or return events, and accurately pair shoppers with checkout activities.
The autonomous stores’ core technology strengths include:
- Custom AI-in-the-wild neural networks that help increase store throughput, boost sales, and reduce shrink
- Proven anonymized journey tracking that respects privacy
- A modular, production-grade software backbone designed for rapid scalability
These foundational assets positioned us perfectly to address retail’s persistent shrink challenges.
The Insight: Your CCTV, Our Innovation
One of our big breakthroughs while designing and developing our multi-layer loss prevention solution was recognizing the untapped potential of existing CCTV infrastructure. Rather than requiring new hardware, we adapted our robust platform’s tracking system to existing sparse CCTV setups. This adaptation strictly followed essential loss-prevention design constraints: reusing pre-installed cameras, ensuring full privacy compliance, minimizing shopper friction, and enabling immediate deployment at scale.
How It Works: Anonymous, Intelligent Tracking—Even in Tough Conditions
Traditional loss prevention computer vision tracking methods often struggle with accuracy, especially when cameras are sparsely placed or produce blurry footage due to their quality. Simple identity-matching techniques fall short when shoppers change their appearance, like taking off a jacket mid-visit, or when different camera angles are used, which may lead to missed events or false alerts.
Our solution takes tracking a step further. We’ve built a sophisticated, multi-person, multi-camera tracking system designed specifically for the realities of retail stores. This means that it can manage even when there are gaps in coverage between cameras as it intelligently parses everyday complexities like crowds, partial visibility, and subtle appearance changes. Basic tracking systems can be easily disrupted by simple, real-world changes in a shopper’s appearance. Our technology is designed for greater resilience and works to provide continuous, anonymous tracking through these common variations. By proactively addressing these common hurdles, our system delivers reliable alerts, meaning in-store teams spend minutes instead of hours addressing shrinkage.
Real Business Impact for Every Stakeholder
By leveraging this new innovative tracking system, we created a loss prevention solution for highly stolen goods that can detect when a shopper picks up a product but does not complete payment. Throughout development and optimization, we considered the diverse needs of all stakeholders:
- Executives: Interested in boosting profit margins, therefore a loss prevention system must deliver a comprehensive, store-wide approach that addresses a wide range of shrinkage use cases
- Store Managers: Wish to simplify store operations that can be mitigated by precision-oriented development, targeting reduced false alarms, ensuring smoother operations.
- In-store Loss Prevention Teams: Need accurate, fast alerts, relevant evidence, and additional insights to shorten investigation time and equip them with immediate evidence.
- Shoppers: Fully anonymous and low-friction experiences that ensure privacy and satisfaction. To maintain a superior shopper experience, FPR must be low, but not as strict as previously stated, since in-store teams handle hundreds of shoppers per shift, while an individual shopper visits the store hundreds of times in a year.
The Road Ahead: See the Difference Yourself
We’re just getting started. Imagine the insights you’d gain watching shoplifting unfold live, seeing exactly how and where shrink happens. You might be surprised by the depth of hidden insights your existing CCTV system already holds. By maximizing sparse camera coverage across your entire store, we’re continuously unlocking richer, actionable evidence and data-driven insights.
And we’re already way beyond just self-checkout monitoring: with the current model covering the entire store shelf to exit. Future innovations will further enhance the response to checkout skipping, sweethearting at manned tills, and entirely new digitally enabled retail experiences.
Curious how much more value lies hidden in your existing store setup?
Schedule your demo and discover what’s already waiting to transform your retail operations.
