Video Analytics for Stores and Warehouses: What Actually Works and What’s Just Marketing

Vendors promise “artificial intelligence on every camera.” In practice, a business needs four or five features — and they already work on ordinary cameras via the cloud. Here’s an honest breakdown.

What works and pays off

• People and vehicle detection. A Telegram alert when a person or a car appears in a zone after hours. The key difference from “motion recording”: it doesn’t react to cats, shadows or swaying branches. It saves hours of footage review and cuts down on false security call-outs.
• Visitor counting. How many people came in, at what hours, and the conversion to receipts (if you connect your POS). For a chain of 3+ locations, it’s the basis for shift scheduling and evaluating marketing.
• License plate recognition. A parking barrier, a log of warehouse entries, a “blacklist.” Works reliably when the camera is installed correctly.
• Zone and line monitoring. Line crossing, entry into a restricted zone, abandoned objects, crowding. For warehouses and production sites, it records safety violations.
• Archive search. “Show me every moment someone was at checkout #2 between 14:00 and 15:00” — instead of watching an hour of footage.

What isn’t worth the money for small businesses yet

• Face recognition to “recognize regular customers.” Expensive, legally questionable, with doubtful impact. Employee access control is a different story — that’s where it works.
• “Heat maps” and “emotion analysis.” Pretty reports that rarely change decisions.
• On-camera analytics. Locks you into a single manufacturer and expensive models; cloud analytics works with any camera.

Camera requirements

For detection and counting, Full HD with good lighting is enough. For license plates, you need a camera at the entrance at an angle of up to 30°, with the plate at least 130 pixels wide in the frame. For visitor counting, a camera above the entrance pointing down. We check camera angles before connecting.

How much it costs

Analytics can be added to any camera in the MyCloud cloud: people/vehicle detection and visitor counting are 3 000 UZS per camera per day, license plate recognition is 5 000. Typically, analytics is needed on 2–4 out of 16 cameras — at entrances, checkouts and the vehicle gate.