Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Walmart using A.I.-powered cameras to spot dodgy shoppers at self-checkouts

Trevor Mogg
By

Walmart may be some time away from following in Amazon’s footsteps when it comes to checkout-free stores, so until then, it has to find its own ways of reducing cases of theft at the final stage of a customer’s shop.

Current efforts include the use of computer vision technology at self-checkout counters, Business Insider reported this week.

Recommended Videos

The big-box retailer confirmed its use of A.I.-powered surveillance, adding that it’s currently in operation at around 20% of its U.S. stores.

Related

The system, called Missed Scan Detection, does what it says, deploying advanced cameras to look for underhand behavior taking place at Walmart’s checkouts.

If the software powering the system understands that an item has passed the scanner without being scanned, an alert is automatically sent to a member of staff who will then investigate to find out what happened. It’s not clear if the technology is advanced enough to detect all of the various different tricks some determined shoplifters deploy at self-checkout counters, though it’s likely that Walmart is working to further develop the system.

Walmart spokeswoman LeMia Jenkins told Business Insider that to date, the company has invested more than $500 million in a bid to tackle crime at its stores.

One answer to shoplifting may be provided by a setup similar to Amazon’s checkout-free Go stores, which use cameras and sensors to track customers as they make their way around the premises, calculating the cost of their shop and automatically charging their Amazon account when they leave. The technology is even clever enough to notice if you return an item to the shelf from your bag should you decide later that you don’t want it.

There are currently 11 Amazon Go stores operating across the U.S.

Walmart tried a low-tech version of the Go store in 2018 — called “Scan & Go” — where customers used a barcode scanner to add up the cost of their shop as they made their way around the store. But it soon ditched the system following poor feedback, low customer take-up — and theft at an even higher level than at self-checkouts, according to one former Walmart executive.

Another admittedly drastic solution would be for Walmart to move its entire operation online. The company has certainly been making efforts to enhance its online shopping experience lately with a revamped website and improvements to its delivery service.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
How the USPS uses Nvidia GPUs and A.I. to track missing mail
A United States Postal Service USPS truck driving on a tree-lined street.

The United States Postal Service, or USPS, is relying on artificial intelligence-powered by Nvidia's EGX systems to track more than 100 million pieces of mail a day that goes through its network. The world's busiest postal service system is relying on GPU-accelerated A.I. systems to help solve the challenges of locating lost or missing packages and mail. Essentially, the USPS turned to A.I. to help it locate a "needle in a haystack."

To solve that challenge, USPS engineers created an edge A.I. system of servers that can scan and locate mail. They created algorithms for the system that were trained on 13 Nvidia DGX systems located at USPS data centers. Nvidia's DGX A100 systems, for reference, pack in five petaflops of compute power and cost just under $200,000. It is based on the same Ampere architecture found on Nvidia's consumer GeForce RTX 3000 series GPUs.

Read more
Algorithmic architecture: Should we let A.I. design buildings for us?
Generated Venice cities

Designs iterate over time. Architecture designed and built in 1921 won’t look the same as a building from 1971 or from 2021. Trends change, materials evolve, and issues like sustainability gain importance, among other factors. But what if this evolution wasn’t just about the types of buildings architects design, but was, in fact, key to how they design? That’s the promise of evolutionary algorithms as a design tool.

While designers have long since used tools like Computer Aided Design (CAD) to help conceptualize projects, proponents of generative design want to go several steps further. They want to use algorithms that mimic evolutionary processes inside a computer to help design buildings from the ground up. And, at least when it comes to houses, the results are pretty darn interesting.
Generative design
Celestino Soddu has been working with evolutionary algorithms for longer than most people working today have been using computers. A contemporary Italian architect and designer now in his mid-70s, Soddu became interested in the technology’s potential impact on design back in the days of the Apple II. What interested him was the potential for endlessly riffing on a theme. Or as Soddu, who is also professor of generative design at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, told Digital Trends, he liked the idea of “opening the door to endless variation.”

Read more
Emotion-sensing A.I. is here, and it could be in your next job interview
man speaking into phone

I vividly remember witnessing speech recognition technology in action for the first time. It was in the mid-1990s on a Macintosh computer in my grade school classroom. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -- and this was magical all right, seeing spoken words appearing on the screen without anyone having to physically hammer them out on a keyboard.

Jump forward another couple of decades, and now a large (and rapidly growing) number of our devices feature A.I. assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. These tools, built using the latest artificial intelligence technology, aren’t simply able to transcribe words -- they are able to make sense of their contents to carry out actions.

Read more