WalkOut: The vision-based solution that simplifies the shopping experience!
Innovation Trends Manager
WalkOut is changing the way shoppers buy in the physical world by moving the checkout to your shopping cart or basket.
The system uses computer vision and machine learning to identify every item you put in the cart or take out, effectively removing all effort and reducing the checkout time to zero.
We discovered them at the Euroshop 2020 trade fair in Düsseldorf last February. Check out our interview of the co-founder Assaf Gedalia in our débriefing below.
WalkOut is changing the way shoppers buy in the physical world by moving the checkout to your shopping cart or basket.
Today, there is no operational solution for autonomous checkout that is based only on computer vision. There is the Amazon Go store that uses computer vision together with other sensors like weight. This is a complex solution that is very expensive and is difficult to integrate in larger format stores.
WalkOut’ system uses computer vision and machine learning to identify every item you put in the cart or take out, effectively removing all effort and reducing the checkout time to zero. The accuracy requirements to make this operational are very high and require state-of-the-art algorithms. In their latest customer testing their solution reached close to 99% accuracy which is very high and above the requirements of retailers.
A big advantage of the WalkOut system is that it can be attached to existing shopping carts and requires no changes to a store to be implemented. This is the only viable approach for big supermarkets which are in charge of 75% of the revenue in the grocery space. WalkOut’s solution includes a screen on the cart that offers personalized content like promotions based on past behavior and the product taken, navigation and product information to encourage consumer usage.
It is the only solution that offers a cart retrofit that uses computer vision only and edge computing. Combining these advantages together means they offer the lowest cost of ownership and the easiest integration.
What are the benefits for a retailer ?
The grocery industry is known for it’s low margins and high volumes. It works on a 3-4 percent margin. Cashiers cost roughly 4% of sales, reducing the number of cashiers has a big impact on the bottom line. Increasing sales obviously has a big impact on the top line. The WalkOut start-up believes that with the solution they can increase a retailer’s sales.
From the customer’s point of view, the customer gets a seamless shopping experience from entrance to exit – no need to scan any items and wait in checkout lines.
On top of that the customer gets a lot of added value from the screen – navigation, product information, shopping lists, shopping gamification and more.
About the startup
The project was born 3 years ago when the founders decided to bring the innovative technologies of computer vision and machine learning to the traditional world of retail. They understood very early that solutions that using a complex matrix of overhead cameras and shelf sensors is not a feasible solution for real-world shopping in big supermarkets and hypermarkets, it is just too complicated and too expensive. This is why they designed a solution that scales down the problem to a single cart or basket, a solution that gives the same seamless shopping experience with the ability to scale fast in large stores.
