Retail Traffic-Flow Analysis Using a Fast Multi-object Detection and Tracking System

Traffic-flow analysis allows to make critical decisions for retail operation management. Common approaches for traffic-flow analysis make use of hardware-based solutions, which have major drawbacks, such as high deployment and maintenance costs. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a Multiple-Object Tracking (MOT) system, following the tracking-by-detection paradigm, that leverages on an ensemble of detectors, each running every f frames. We further measured the performance of our model in the MOT16 Challenge and applied our algorithm to obtain heatmaps and paths for customers and shopping carts in a retail store from CCTV cameras.