VisiScanner offers a powerful tool for retailers, marketers, market researchers and media agencies to better understand and target customers and measure the effectiveness of offline promotions and advertising. Measuring the effectiveness of advertisements is only one aspect as the system is capable of assisting market research is several ways.

"The face recognition system was first developed as a people counter under Intellio's retail marketing project for chain stores and malls" - said Adorján Princz, CTO of Intellio. Once the counter worked reliably we moved towards developing an accurate way to identify age and gender. Soon we arrived at a stage in the development process when we realized that the product could be much more than what we originally planned. Besides being just a simple counter it can now map out customer behavior and measure how many people show interest in a particular ad or promotion, and do this by segmenting the audience according to age and gender. In addition to the above Intellio's Customer Analytics Solution can also detect if lines in a store get longer than usual, and show paths most frequently taken by customers."

Face recognition has two main fields of application. One of these is the analysis of customer behavior in retail stores. The information gathered this way can provide valuable insight when designing advertisements and customer incentives. It is quite unlikely that there is any shop owner who would not want to know how many people went into their store after looking at the display, where they went inside the shop, and which shelf or counter interested them the most. Our video analytics-based tools provide capabilities for marketers, retailers and researchers that are similar to the real-time analytical tools in online advertising. Gender and age information make these statistics even richer source of customer data" - said Szonja Balogh Communication Director of Intellio.

The other important area the analysis of offline display media consumption. VisiScanner has the potential to radically change how we look at the effectiveness of indoor and outdoor advertisements today. The software informs marketing experts not only about their target group's composition according to age, gender but also about the time spent on actually looking at the media piece rather than just passing by. "It can even tell how media consumer trends change within the shopping mall based on the location of stores and advertisements, providing a useful tool for real estate operators to properly value rented retail space" - added Balogh. The software can also be useful to promote a particular product by displaying targeted advertisements to younger or older male or female audiences based on the actual composition of the people present.

The new technology supports digital information displays (Digital Signage Systems). Hooked up to one of these displays the software can show different advertisements at different times of the day based on prior statistics of customer composition.

"When the system receives images from one of the cameras it checks whether they contain human faces. If the identification is positive it goes on displaying the person's gender, age, and expected direction of movement relative to the previous frame" - explains Adorján Princz. It is important to note that accuracy is not affected by the ethnic origin of the person. Intellio's solution can be deployed in a number of different scenarios especially where automatic people counting or the acquisition of demographic information is necessary. "What we have here is basically Artificial Intelligence working inside the software, because the more we teach it the more accurate it gets" added Princz.

The software can identify or measure the following:

- Gender and age of individuals

- The time somebody spent looking at a certain object (e.g. advertisement)

- The number of people passing by

- The size of an audience

Creating Statistics:

- Number of all visitors / displaying highs and lows on a timescale

- Number of female visitors / displaying highs and lows on a timescale

- Number of male visitors / displaying highs and lows on a timescale

- All visitors according to age group / displaying highs and lows on a timescale

- Query according to point of entry

- Area statistics for floors or corridors

- Summary for a single area (multiple points of entry)

- Summary for multiple areas

- Summary for the whole system

- Area statistics based on time and people count