CAM-75
Queue at the supermarket checkout
A supermarket checkout in mid-afternoon: one single till open and serving, with twelve people queueing in front of it, the last of them almost out into the aisle. IRIS counts how many are waiting and how long each one takes to be served; it does not know who any of them are.
Turn on IRIS Vision
AI-generated image
What IRIS understands
What it recognises in this scene
- checkout queue
- open till
What this camera gives back
Nobody gets an alert here. Here you get numbers.
- 12Waiting
- 6 min+2 minCurrent wait
- 38Paid per hour
- 18:30 – 19:30Peak hour
- 1 min 40 sTime per customer
- 4Give up on the queue
The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client's measurement.
IRIS incorporates NeuralPax, a separate licence certified by the Spanish Metrology Centre for people counting, occupancy and crowd-flow control. That the figure is right is guaranteed by a third party, not by us, and that is why it holds up against the regulations in force. The certification covers that measurement — counting people — not the whole product.
The series, not one figure
One number says nothing. A curve does.
Queue and people who leave without paying
- Waiting in the queue
- Leave the trolley and go
| Slot | Waiting in the queue | Leave the trolley and go |
|---|---|---|
| 06 | 3 | 0 |
| 08 | 7 | 1 |
| 10 | 11 | 3 |
| 12 | 14 | 5 |
| 14 | 9 | 1 |
| 16 | 8 | 1 |
| 18 | 16 | 6 |
| 20 | 12 | 2 |
| 22 | 4 | 0 |
The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client's measurement.
How the counting works
Counting is not something you ask for. You draw a line.
One line is drawn right at the exit of the till: whoever crosses it is a customer who has paid. And there is an area painted over the queue, saying how far the line reaches. Those two things give you the figures that matter: how many people are waiting right now, how long each customer takes to be served and how long the whole queue takes to clear. None of this can be asked for in words, because a line cannot be described in a sentence: it is traced once onto the image and stays there, so Tuesday's figure and Saturday's are measured the same way.
- till exit · Counting line
- queue area · Dwell zone
What changes
What changes for whoever runs the store
The figure almost nobody has is the last one: how many people leave the trolley and walk out without paying because the queue isn't moving. That is a sale that was already made and is lost three metres from the till. Today the store manager decides to open another till by glancing over his shoulder, and by the time he can see it over his shoulder he is twenty minutes late. With the line and the area in place he has the wait to the minute, how long each customer is taking to be served and which way the queue is heading, and he opens another till before the line reaches the aisle; at the end of the month he also has the curve for the whole day, which is what it takes to decide how many tills are staffed at seven on a Friday. The figures on the illustration are an example, not any store's measurement.
What people usually ask
How does IRIS know somebody has given up on the queue?
Because they enter the queue area and leave by a way that isn't the exit. IRIS sees that a person was inside the drawn area, turned round and walked off up the aisle instead of crossing the line at the till exit. That is giving up. It does not know who they were or what was in the trolley: it knows that one fewer person made it to paying, and that is exactly the figure that was missing.
Does IRIS identify the customers standing in the queue?
No. It counts bodies entering and leaving a drawn area and crossing a line. It does not recognise faces, it does not compare them against any database, it does not store who anyone is and it does not follow a person from one store to another. A customer who has waited nine minutes is a number, and that number is all you need to know whether to open another till.
Can one store's figure be compared with another store's?
Yes, as long as the line and the area are set with the same criterion in both. That is precisely why they are drawn rather than described: a sentence gets read differently in each store, whereas a line is where it is. For a chain, this is what separates a figure you can take to a management meeting from every manager's own opinion.
A different case every time
A new case each time. Always the same screen.
It plays by itself and shows one case from start to finish. It is a summary: the real screen has far more functions than fit in this box.
- The alert fires
- You open it
- You confirm or dismiss
Next step
How long does it take to find a hand played two hours ago?
12 cases: 9 raise an alert when something happens and 3 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
What does a shopping centre see beyond the visitor count?
12 cases: 4 raise an alert when something happens and 8 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
“The white van, Tuesday afternoon.”That is enough to find it.
You type it the way you would tell a colleague, and the matching minutes come back, each with its camera and its time. You do not need to remember the exact moment.
Tell us your problem and we will say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
We reply the same working day.