IoT-based surveillance for instant marketing in real stores

Abstract

The recent boom of e-shops and network-based advertising tools clearly showed the power of new technologies and solutions in the area of trade and marketing. However, so far little attention has been paid to apply e-* systems to real stores and marketplaces. This situation was mainly caused by the lack of efficient tracking tools, equivalent to network-based log analysis, server- and client-side cookies, timing registration and examination, etc. Thus, an efficient implementation of, e.g. a recommendation system or instant advertisement in a real store was quite problematic. In this paper, we propose to apply Internet of Things devices and services to fill the gap and to get additional information about the behavior and the activities of the customers in a real store. Such information would be used as a basic input for different marketing tools, including above-mentioned recommendation systems, instant advertisement and promotion, JIT discounts, etc. We assume two-level architecture of the system: local networks of IoT devices and necessary hubs, and a shared marketing server, to implement several marketing utilities and strategies. The paper is devoted to the organization of the first level, namely a local multiplexer and virtualizer of IoT devices, including not only simple HVAC sensors, but also RFID/NFC/QR/BLE localizers, surveillance cameras with intelligent image-processing extensions, as well as a protocol to share the information obtained from the local sensors with the cloud.