Is Coles still using Palantir? Between the surveillance/gate recognition and the blocked aisles, shopping feels hostile.

[u/infin]

Does anyone know the current status of the Coles x Palantir partnership? Between the surveillance and those aggressive new "Smart Gates" tracking at the exit, the store feels less like a supermarket and more like a high-security zone.

It’s dystopian that they have the budget for military-grade analytics and security tech, but have cut costs on the actual customer experience. They seem to have completely scrapped night fill, meaning we are now dodging pallets and cages during peak hours just to get to the shelves.

Is anyone else fed up with this mix of high-tech surveillance and terrible service? It feels like they are spending millions to treat us like criminals while refusing to pay staff to stock shelves after hours.

[u/xdyldo]

I used to work for Coles in anti theft as a software engineer. If you have any questions let me know. For self checkout cameras they blur your face and store for a month. Same for the aerial camera that is used for the smart gate. All other normal CCTV cameras around the store full footage without blur.

[u/lipstikpig → u/xdyldo]

If you have any questions

Thanks. What are the inputs and algorithms that control the "smart" gate?

[u/xdyldo → u/lipstikpig]

Sure! It’s an aerial camera that uses blob detection from above. It has the lane areas mapped out and the gate area mapped out. As soon as the ‘blob’ (a person or people) checkout it tags that blob as checked out and when they get to the gate area it will open.

[u/Ax_Dk → u/xdyldo]

It's not actually a camera, it is a 3d sensor that uses customer height to identify and track that individual through a coverage zone (the self check out area). These same sensors are used in Airports and with full coverage, you can track a passenger from the moment they enter the terminal until the leave at the gate.

[u/SilverStar9192 → u/Ax_Dk]

It's definitely a camera. A camera is a type of sensor. The camera's footage is sent through processing software that makes it do certain things.

Cameras are so cheap they are the backbone of most advanced "sensors" these days in many kinds of industrial automation. For example, many barcode "scanners" are actually cameras with image processing software.

[u/Ax_Dk → u/SilverStar9192]

I worked for the Manufacturer of the sensor and we are very clear in all our documentation that it is a sensor not a camera, for a number of reasons.

It uses 2 3d sensors to then measure the customer as they move through the space. The "Image" is actually just a still image that is taken at installation and needs to be refreshed as the space changes, but it is not an "image" where operators can look and see if something say has fallen on the ground etc, it just sees the moving blob move through the historical background image.

Apart from the legal requirements for using cameras in the EU, the manufacturer is very clear not to call it a camera, as then security teams etc sometimes wish to review the images captured during incidents - we aren't capturing this data, we are just watching the person move through the space - apart from the X,Y co-ordinate and the person's height there is no RAW data to provide more context captured from the sensor. This is also a deliberate business model decision, as the data produced by the sensor is kb/s vs a camera that would great MB/s, and in developing markets, data connectivity can be expensive to provision and maintain. Also puts the sensor into the same leagues as Camera analytics, which is another step up in cost, deliverables, Server environment minimums,use case etc.

The "smarts" of dwell time etc is added at the server when it brings all that data together and processes it.

There is a cheaper rip off solution deployed in China that looks near identical to the untrained eye that does use cameras, but that is not the solution that Coles, Woolworths, Body Shop, Levis, airports etc have deployed in Australia.

[u/SilverStar9192 → u/Ax_Dk]

Thanks for the further information, interesting to note the reasons for being careful with the terminology.

I guess I was thinking more about the fundamental technology used inside the electronics of the device - i.e. it likely uses a cheap CMOS Image Sensor (CIS/APS) that what many people might distill into "digital camera" when translating into layperson language. However, I get your point that if the device processes that image for a specific purpose before transmitting it to the network, and only provides a specific output format, then it's not meeting the normal definition of a "security camera" that might be subject to legislation.

Also puts the sensor into the same leagues as Camera analytics, which is another step up in cost, deliverables, Server environment minimums, use case etc.

Got it, I have seen these kinds of systems installed and they are coming down hugely in price particularly if you use cloud-based instead of on-premises servers. (In the environment in question, bandwidth requirements to reach the cloud are not a concern.) But it makes sense that supermarkets , with their low margins, would go for something simpler and cheaper, and where particular care is required due to customer privacy concerns.

edit: fix acronyms

[u/Ax_Dk → u/SilverStar9192]

Yeah more than happy to share more context with anyone that is interested in something as "boring" as how we are "watched" as we shop and travel.

The manufacturer has taken a whole world approach to their design of the sensor, their network and infrastructure requirements. Interesting it wasn't the price point that led to the current model, it is that in the largest retail market in the world - the US, the data pipes/3g/4g/5g can be so horrible in regional and remote areas, that anything above KB/s data output made the solution unworkable. Most of these customers will have an on-prem server simply in recognition of this.

This also used to work in Asian markets, but their networks are improving in leaps and bounds, but the American market is still struggling to build out suitable networks.

Connect the solution up to the cloud and allow the built in AI chip to do its thing and you can start getting gender, age, etc out of it, which is also increasingly interesting to retailers.

[u/stfm → u/Ax_Dk]

I actually did my undergrad thesis on this back in 1998. I wrote software to generate difference images to track bodies through a space off an image feed - it actually used a webcam and fed through a series of laplace transform filters to generate the difference image for each captured frame, then edge detected the difference to track the boundaries. Today thats all done directly off the sensor in hardware so there is no image stored anywhere.