NVIDIA and Loss Prevention Retail Council Introduce AI Solution to Address Organized Retail Crime

NVIDIA and the Loss Prevention Research Council (LPRC) are collaborating with several AI companies to showcase a real-time solution for combating and preventing organized retail crime (ORC).

The integrated offering provides advance notifications of suspicious behavior inside and outside stores so that authorities can intervene early.

The LPRC includes asset-protection executives from more than 85 major retail chains, with hundreds of thousands of stores worldwide, as well as law enforcement, consumer packaged goods companies and technology solutions partners. It’s focused on collaborating with the retail industry to reduce shrink — the loss of products for reasons other than sales — and increase safety and security at stores and shopping malls.

Flash mobs and smash-and-grab thefts are a growing concern, costing retailers billions of dollars in lost revenue and causing safety concerns among customers and employees. Crime syndicates have committed brazen, large-scale thefts, often selling stolen merchandise on the black market.

A National Retail Federation survey found that shrink accounted for $112 billion in losses in 2022, with an estimated two-thirds due to theft.

Increasingly, this involves violence. According to the survey, 67% of respondents said they were seeing more violence and aggression associated with organized-crime theft than a year ago.

The AI-based solution, which helps retailers get a jump on often-evasive, fast-moving organized crime groups, uses technology from several leading AI firms that have built their high-performance AI applications on the NVIDIA Metropolis application framework and microservices.

The solution includes product recognition and tracking, as well as anomaly detection, from AiFi, vehicle license plate and model recognition from BriefCam, and physical security management from SureView to provide advance and real-time notifications to retailer command centers.

The three are among over 500 software companies and startups that have developed retail, safety and security AI applications on NVIDIA Metropolis software development kits for vision AI — and that have been certified as NVIDIA Metropolis partners.

“The proposed AI-based ORC solution combines LPRC’s deep expertise in loss prevention from over 23 years of collaboration with asset protection executives with NVIDIA’s deep AI expertise,” said Read Hayes, who leads the LPRC and is a University of Florida research scientist and criminologist. “We believe this type of cross-industry collaboration will help retailers fight back against organized retail crime.”

Developing Integrated AI for Securing Stores 

AiFi, based in Silicon Valley, develops computer vision solutions, including autonomous retail capabilities built on the NVIDIA Metropolis application framework. Its solution detects anomalies in shopper behavior, tracks items removed from shelves and notifies retailers if shoppers bypass checkout lanes.

BriefCam, based in Newton, Mass., provides deep learning-based video analytics technology for insightful decision-making. Enabling the forensic search, alerting on and visualization of objects in video, the BriefCam Platform includes integrated license plate recognition and cross-camera object tracking, alongside other capabilities that support effective asset protection and real-time response to theft attempts.

SureView, based in Tampa, Fla., offers a software platform for managing multiple security systems with a single view. The company’s physical security management system receives signals from the AiFi and BriefCam applications, helping teams coordinate a quick and consistent response and providing notifications to store security operations and law enforcement based on the retailer’s business rules.

For more information about AI solutions for mitigating organized retail crime, connect with the NVIDIA team at NRF: Retail’s Big Show, the world’s largest retail expo, taking place Jan. 14-16 at the Javits Convention Center in New York.

Attend the Big Ideas session on Organized Retail Crime on Jan. 14 at 2 p.m. ET, moderated by the LPRC, to discover how Kroger and Jacksons Food are using AI in their stores to tackle crime.

The ORC solution will be showcased at NRF — visit NVIDIA experts in Lenovo’s booth (3665) and Dell’s booth (4957) to learn more about it from NVIDIA’s software partners.