Investigation of Customer Behavior Analysis Based on Top-View Depth Camera

Human behavior analysis based on surveillance camera is one of hot topics in security, marketing as well as computer vision and pattern recognition, and these are useful for commercial facilities such as convenience stores or book stores. In general, since surveillance camera is placed on the ceiling near store wall to monitor customer behaviors, the majority of this research utilize human model adapted to a front view of the person because the human shape has high discriminative power for human detection, pose estimation, etc. However, this approach has a problem that customers are often occluded by others in the store. To solve this occlusion problem for behavior analysis, we propose a new human behavior analysis method with top-view depth camera. In this research, for the first step to investigate the effectiveness of the analysis, we suppose the book store situation. Our proposed method is composed two behavior estimators. The first estimator is based on height of hand with depth information and the second is based on SVM with depth and PSA (Pixel State Analysis) based features. The characteristic point of our proposed method is that we utilize these estimators by cascading them. From experimental results with 10 behaviors of 3 subjects, although our research is still exploratory, we have confirmed that our proposed method allows us to obtain 89.5% of average estimation accuracy.