METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR RECOGNIZING THE INTENTIONS OF SHOPPERS IN RETAIL AISLES BASED ON THEIR TRAJECTORIES

The present invention is a method and system for automatically recognizing which products a shopper intends to find or purchase based on the shopper's trajectory in a retail aisle. First, the system detects and tracks the person to generate the trajectory of the shopper. Then some of the dynamic features are extracted from the shopper trajectory. The shopper trajectory features of a given trajectory are typically the positions, the motion orientations, and speeds at each point of the trajectory. A shopper behavior model is designed based on some of the primitive actions of shoppers. The last step of the method is to analyze a given shopper trajectory to estimate the shopper's intention. The step either utilizes decision rules based on the extracted shopper trajectory features, or utilizes a trained Hidden Markov Model, to estimate the progression of the primitive actions from the trajectory. The decoded progression of the shopper behavior states is then interpreted to finally determine the shopper's intention.