SET Prisma: 10 years of protecting trade.
More experience — more opportunities
2009 was an anniversary year for the SET Prisma system — it was developed by specialists from the Crystal Service company in 1999. At this time, Russian trade reached a level of development at which a store needs not only to track the movement of goods and automate the work of the cash register, but also to keep personnel under control. It became clear that the main tool for preventing internal losses is a video surveillance system.
However, video control is a technology consisting of two components: video recording of what is happening at the checkout node and its synchronization with data received from the cash register equipment. And the creators of various cash control systems defined the priority of one or another component in different ways. In the SET Prisma system, the bet was made from the very beginning on intelligent mechanisms for detecting theft at the checkout node, on how to restore the real picture by comparing individual events: what and why the cashier, the buyer, the controller did.
This path provided the SET Prisma system with the opportunity for continuous development. The practice of using the system itself indicated the direction in which to move. Over 10 years, not only the professionalism of security service specialists has grown, but also the “qualification” of unscrupulous trade workers. Theft schemes have been improved – and the software product has been improved. Experience in identifying illegal actions has been accumulated – and these clues have been transformed by the SET Prisma developers into clear algorithms that allow finding and punishing the guilty.
Analyze this!
With the growth of retail outlets, expansion of the checkout line, and an increase in the number of 24-hour stores, security services are faced with a serious problem: how to analyze the huge array of video data that video cameras provide daily?
The specialists of the Crystal Service company set themselves the task of automating the work of analysts as much as possible. Now, based on one identified episode, the SET Prisma system searched for other similar ones in the archive. Working with reports acquired an important role — based on peak values, an analyst could suspect a particular type of abuse and focus attention on certain actions of a certain cashier. The creators of the system called such video monitoring «event-based».
In the past 2008, the Crystal Service company presented the 5th version of SET Prisma. The authors of the system took the path of further automating the detection of thefts and reducing the routine work of analysts. For this purpose, two new technologies appeared in the new version of the software product — filter technology and scanner technology.
Through the filter of suspicion
As experience with the system in various retail outlets accumulated, it became obvious that, along with traditionally “alarming” events (cancellation of goods on a receipt, cancellation of a receipt, re-authorization of a bank card), the procedures of many thefts can be described by a combination of the most “harmless” actions.
Filters automate the detection of exactly these types of thefts. Each filter is a combination of one or more events with contextual information on the receipt. The data flow, passing through the filters, is divided into standard, unsuspicious events and those that require additional study. As a result, security officers focus their attention only on the information that is worthy of it.
Scanning with regard to local specifics
Even within the same chain, there are no two identical stores. In one, people buy more in the evenings, in another — during the lunch break, etc.
The scanners used in the new version of SET Prisma are software modules that analyze the statistics of the checkout node in a specific store. They process events that have already been sorted by filters according to various conditions and independently identify thefts and cashier errors.
By taking into account the statistics of events at a specific facility, the scanner technology makes it possible to identify violations with a very high degree of accuracy. The analyst only has to make a final decision after viewing the corresponding video fragment.
Free software reduces costs
Today, the practice of using SET Prisma shows that the payback period of the system is several months, implying that we are talking about funds returned to the trading enterprise in the form of fines.
Nevertheless, for the developers of SET Prisma it was important not only to ensure the fastest return on investment, but also to reduce the operating costs of their product. To do this, they made it multi-platform.
The SET Prisma 5 event server and video server can operate under both Microsoft Windows Server and the free Linux operating system. In the latter case, it is possible to work with any platform-independent DBMS, for example, the freely distributed MySQL. Crystal Service specialists have reduced the licensing burden on the system and made effective video monitoring more accessible.