RetailOpt: Opt-In, Easy-to-Deploy Trajectory Estimation from Smartphone Motion Data and Retail Facility Information

TL;DR

RetailOpt is a smartphone-based system that accurately tracks customer movements in retail stores using inertial navigation and store data, without extra hardware, enabling valuable in-store analytics.

Contribution

It introduces a deployable, hardware-free trajectory estimation method combining inertial navigation with store map and purchase data for retail environments.

Findings

Effective in five diverse retail environments

Achieves accurate customer trajectory estimation

Eliminates need for additional hardware

Abstract

We present RetailOpt, a novel opt-in, easy-to-deploy system for tracking customer movements offline in indoor retail environments. The system uses readily accessible information from customer smartphones and retail apps, including motion data, store maps, and purchase records. This eliminates the need for additional hardware installations/maintenance and ensures customers full data control. Specifically, RetailOpt first uses inertial navigation to recover relative trajectories from smartphone motion data. The store map and purchase records are cross-referenced to identify a list of visited shelves, providing anchors to localize the relative trajectories in a store through continuous and discrete optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in five diverse environments. The system, if successful, would produce accurate customer movement data, essential for a broad range of retail applications including customer behavior analysis and in-store navigation.