Soft margin keyframe comparison: Enhancing precision of fraud detection in retail surveillance

We propose a novel approach for enhancing precision in a leading video analytics system that detects cashier fraud in grocery stores for loss prevention. While intelligent video analytics has recently become a promising means of loss prevention for retailers, most of the real-world systems suffer from a large number of false alarms, resulting in a significant waste of human labor during manual verification. Our proposed approach starts with the candidate fraudulent events detected by a state-of-the-art system. Such fraudulent events are a set of visually recognized checkout-related activities of the cashier without barcode associations. Instead of conducting costly video analysis, we extract a few keyframes to represent the essence of each candidate fraudulent event, and compare those keyframes to identify whether or not the event is a valid check-out process that involves consistent appearance changes on the lead-in belt, the scan area and the take-away belt. Our approach also performs a margin-based soft classification so that the user could trade off between saving human labor and preserving high recall. Experiments on days of surveillance videos collected from real grocery stores show that our algorithm can save about 50% of human labor while preserving over 90% of true alarms with small computational overhead. © 2010 IEEE.