It is no secret that customer insight is crucial to business success. Customer expectations are arguably higher and more demanding now than ever. Knowing your customer’s behavior patterns, how they engage, and their wants and needs enable businesses to develop the desired customer experience that drives loyalty and revenue.
While for online businesses, customer insight data may be easier to detect via metrics such as page views, download numbers, and similar analytics; the task can be more complicated for offline businesses. Drawing customer insights from vast volumes of data is complicated, costly, and time-consuming. So, what options do businesses have when gathering and deciphering data?
Using a Camera as a Sensor
For monitoring purposes, existing camera infrastructure can draw value from the enormous amounts of data it generates while maintaining privacy. Consider transport, logistics, industry, manufacturing, hospitality, and retail. The one thing that these applications have in common is video systems.
Using automated computer vision technology and machine learning capabilities to process the video footage and draw various data types can give visibility into customer interests and habits. This type of raw data includes:
- Detect, count, and track object movement
- Classify by color and condition type
- Measure distance and proximity
- Read text and numbers such as barcodes and labels
- Recognize gestures and physical activities.
Edge Computing Processes the Sensor Data
These data sets are helpful in various scenarios to determine real-time customer interest in a particular product, a store section, a shop floor promotion, or a tradeshow area. The data is also relevant for optimizing traffic management and analyzing wait times at fast food outlets, line lengths in retail stores, airport curbside parking, and parking lot congestion. Throughput can be tracked in applications such as shipping yards and freight operations, and objects such as parts or products can be identified via barcodes and text labels. Such actionable data can contribute to improved efficiency and operations and optimized cost management regardless of the application.
Capturing, processing, and analyzing data from camera fleets requires suitable technology and edge infrastructure to deliver low latency, real-time insight, and capabilities locally. The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 provides the necessary speed and agility for the analytic-intensive processing of edge applications, including computer vision. Accelerated analytic processing optimizes efficiency and operations for an improved customer experience and business cost management.
The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 is further enhanced through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Panorama service, delivering both appliance and computer vision technology as a customer intelligence platform with a hybrid edge architecture to improve business operations. The AWS Panorama service allows you to add computer vision and machine learning capabilities to your existing on-premises camera infrastructure with AWS Panorama-compatible devices such as the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70. The appliance runs secure computer vision applications from AWS partners or applications you build with the AWS Panorama software development kit (SDK).
The edge compute power of the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 device combined with the AWS Panorama capabilities means businesses no longer need to stream video to the cloud, instead performing tasks at the edge based on real-time insight. Video feeds can be processed at the edge and analyzed through the single management interface in milliseconds.
Delivering AI Solutions to the market is a challenge for many organizations. Our solutions allow organizations to allocate more resources to application development by providing off-the-shelf hardware solutions and software platforms. Through our collaboration with Lenovo and AWS, Arrow Electronics offers the ThinkEdge SE70 to enable customers to accelerate their time-to-market and reduce development costs.
Reach out to us to get started
To learn more about the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 device, visit the Lenovo ThinkEdge page.
To learn more about AWS Panorama, visit the AWS Panorama product page.
