When you set up Horus for a retail deployment, the first thing you do after connecting cameras is draw detection zones.
A zone is a polygon you draw on the camera view. The AI monitors activity inside that zone continuously — counting people, tracking dwell time, detecting specific events, and alerting your team when configured thresholds are crossed.
The zones you draw on day one determine what intelligence you get. Here are the five that deliver the most immediate value for a retail store.
1. The entrance / exit line
Type: Line crossing
Purpose: Footfall counting
Draw a line across your main entrance. Every time a person crosses it, the counter increments. At the end of the day, you have accurate foot traffic data by hour.
This single data point changes how you schedule staff. Instead of guessing or using fixed rotas, you can see exactly when customers arrive and match staffing to real demand.
Useful insight it enables: "Our peak hours are 12–2pm and 5–7pm on weekdays. We were understaffed during both windows."
2. The checkout queue area
Type: Occupancy / dwell time
Purpose: Queue length monitoring
Draw a zone around your checkout area. Configure an alert to fire when more than 3 people are in the zone simultaneously (or whatever threshold fits your layout).
When the queue builds, your manager gets notified. They can open another till or redirect floor staff before customers abandon their baskets.
This is one of the highest-value zones in retail — long queues are a direct cause of abandoned purchases.
3. The stockroom / back office door
Type: Intrusion
Purpose: Access monitoring
Draw a zone just inside your stockroom or back office door. Configure it to alert on any entry.
Use cases:
- Monitor for after-hours access
- Know when staff enter the stockroom during customer-facing periods
- Log all access events with snapshot evidence
No more wondering who went into the stockroom and when.
4. A key display or high-value product area
Type: Dwell time
Purpose: Customer engagement and security
Draw a zone around a key product display or high-value merchandise area. Set a dwell time alert for extended presence (e.g. more than 2 minutes without a purchase).
This gives you two types of intelligence:
- Engagement data: are customers spending time with this display?
- Security signal: is someone spending unusual time near high-value stock?
Adjust the threshold based on which signal matters more for your store.
5. The staff entrance / fire exit
Type: Intrusion
Purpose: After-hours security
Draw a zone inside your staff entrance or near fire exits. Set it to alert on any detection outside of business hours.
This is your cheapest, fastest security upgrade — no new cameras, no alarm system changes, just a zone on an existing camera that alerts your phone if anyone is in the store when they shouldn't be.
A note on zone placement
The zone boundary matters as much as the zone type. A few tips:
- Cover the area fully — don't leave gaps at the edges where people might slip through undetected
- Exclude irrelevant movement — if there's a busy street visible through a window, make sure it's outside your zone boundary
- For counting lines, position the line so people cross it perpendicularly rather than at an angle
What to do after setting up these zones
Once these five zones are active, spend a few hours watching alerts come in and calibrating confidence thresholds. If you're getting too many false alerts, increase the threshold. If you're missing events, lower it.
Most deployments stabilise within the first day or two.
From there, you'll have enough data within a week to start making staffing and layout decisions based on what the cameras are actually showing you.