Video surveillance solutions that solely provide basic video recording functionality are slowly passing into oblivion: the present-day market has an increasing demand that video management systems of the new generation expand their functionality with all kinds of smart subsystems, which can streamline the investigation processes.
Video surveillance solutions that solely provide basic video recording functionality are slowly passing into oblivion: the present-day market has an increasing demand that video management systems of the new generation expand their functionality with all kinds of smart subsystems, which can streamline the investigation processes. Specifically, integration with various third-party modules is becoming a must, and one of the most required ones is support for the point-of-sale systems.
Luxriot EVO introduces its Data Sources feature, which not only allows POS transaction reception but also supports collecting data from any third-party hardware such as cameras and access control devices, or any other digital systems that deliver serial textual data, with further synchronization and embedding with video. The received data can then be investigated and immediate reactions to specified keywords can be also set up, ensuring real-time response to important events. Speaking of retail operation, this means efficient activity monitoring of cashiers and stores, which helps detect and, possibly, prevent questionable situations, such as unauthorized discounts and even fraud or theft, thus playing a big part in loss prevention.
Easily configurable, this module allows reading of serial data from COM and UDP/TCP ports and combining these data with video channels with no limitation on the number of used data sources and output channels. Once a POS terminal output has been associated with a video stream, it is possible to view it live or play back its recorded archive with transaction data overlaying the video: this ensures accurate and detailed account of what is going on and provides an opportunity to verify if cashier operations correlate with actual transactions. The data stream is automatically divided into individual transactions based on configurable start and end keywords, which can be defined either explicitly or using regular expressions. Additionally, EVO gives the user an option to set up automatic scenarios for the defined POS exceptions — keywords or certain quantities and prices. In this way, external data can be used to trigger internal EVO functions, such as event-driven recording, sound alerts, text notifications to email, messengers and client applications including mobile apps, and many more.
EVO client application, in turn, displays the transaction data synchronously with the video — the data overlay has a configurable position, size and timeout. EVO also allows to split a single serial data stream between multiple video streams: this comes in handy when data from several terminals is delivered via the same socket. Live view and archive playback is available, along with the immediate review with the instant playback feature and further investigation with text search from one or multiple data sources with an option to export search results in CSV format.
The feature usage is not limited to POS terminals only; it has been successfully used for receiving data from intercoms, vending machines and even camera-side license plate recognition results. Luxriot is looking forward to exploring new ways, in which its customers can benefit from this integration.