Method and apparatus for the detection of behaviours in a retail environment

An apparatus for identification of suspect client behaviour in a retail environment, comprising:

• means for detecting a person in a frame of a stream of video data obtained from a plurality of video sensors in the retail environment, wherein detecting the person comprises establishing localization information for the detected person, by establishing a bounding box framing the person;
• means for classifying the identified person as a tracked person or a non-tracked person;
• means for tracking the path of the tracked person about the retail environment, wherein tracking the path of the tracked person comprises encoding the appearance of the person based on a plurality of semantic features selected from a list including visual appearance, body movement or interaction with the surroundings in the retail environment;
• means for extracting by a behaviour detection unit, a set of activities of the tracked person from the one or more frames of the stream of video data, wherein extracting the set of activities comprises estimating a set of poses of tracked person, and wherein estimating the set of poses comprises identifying a predefined set of points on the tracked person and detecting successive movements of each of the predefined set of points over a time interval, and wherein the behaviour detection unit comprises a trajectory computation module adapted to output a predicted trajectory for the tracked person;
• an object detection module configured to detect an object which the tracked person picked up in the retail environment and assign a unique object identifier to the object;
• and a human pose estimation module for the detection of the set of activities or behaviours of the identified tracked person;
• means for assigning a numeric value to each extracted activity in the set of extracted activities, said numeric value being representative of a threat level of the activity;
• means for accumulating said numeric values to provide a behaviour score;
• and
• means for identifying a behaviour as being suspect when the behaviour score reaches a target threshold value associated with the behaviour.