Retail · Case study

Purchasing tells you what happened. Attention adds context about what happened before it.

Anonymous camera observations were connected to spatial movement and shelf-attention signals.

Case study context

The project and the problem

A retailer wanted to understand how shoppers moved through a physical store and which shelf areas attracted attention before a purchase, without identifying individuals. Sales records showed only the final transaction, while people counting and person detection could not reveal what someone looked at. An ordinary store camera also provided no reliable training label for the shopper's true gaze direction.

How the process worked

The store was mapped into a shared coordinate system and anonymous camera tracks were localized within it. During model development, eye-tracking glasses supplied the missing gaze ground truth, linking camera imagery, shopper position and the shelf actually viewed; deployment then required only the ordinary camera feed to estimate shelf-attention events.

Attention evidence thread

How did camera observations become spatial and gaze information?

Use the controls below to inspect the key stages, constraints and validation decisions in that process.

From a camera frame to shelf-level attention.

Move through a short example to see how a shopper position becomes a shelf-level attention pattern.

Perspective viewLocate the shopper
Shelf AShelf BShelf C
Find the person in the camera frame
Top-down planMap their position
Shelf AShelf BShelf C
Place that position in the store
Shelf viewConnect gaze to an area
Build the attention pattern over time

Operating constraints

  • No personal identification
  • Camera perspective
  • Need for gaze ground truth
  • Physical-to-digital spatial mapping

What changed

  • An additional behavioral signal
  • Anonymous movement context
  • Shelf-level attention exploration
  • A privacy-conscious analytical view

Evidence retained: Review connected the source camera frame, anonymous position, estimated gaze target and accumulated shelf attention.

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