AI Video Security
Use this page to connect your store's cameras to Brother POS, so you get a short list of moments worth checking and real numbers on foot traffic and checkout waits.
Quick steps
- Ask Brother POS support to switch the feature on. Loss Prevention (or Traffic Analytics) then appears in the admin navigation.
- Go to Loss Prevention > Vision Boxes, click + Register a box and copy the connection token — it's shown only once.
- Download the Ubuntu installer or Windows installer from the Set up a vision box card, run it on a small computer in the store, and paste the token when asked. Wait for the box to show Online.
- Go to Cameras. Add each camera with Add a camera, or click one the box found, fill in Camera settings, tick Enabled and click Save camera.
- Click a camera, drag a box over the doorway on its picture, choose the Entrance purpose and click Save zone. Do the same over the till with Register.
- Check Security Events for flagged moments and Traffic Analytics for your numbers.
Without an entrance zone there are no foot-traffic numbers. Without a register zone there are no wait times or abandoned checkouts.
Common questions
Do I need new cameras? Usually not. Your existing network security cameras normally work. You do need one small computer in the store.
Does my video go to the cloud? No. Continuous video stays on the box in your store. Only still pictures of events and anonymous people-counts are sent.
Does it recognise faces? No. It reads licence plates against a watchlist you keep, and the AI review describes behaviour and clothing only.
Why is there no Watch full clip button? Tick Record clips on the box on the Vision Boxes page, and watch from the store's own network.
Who can see these pages? Admins and managers only.
More detail: what it does, and the equipment you need
AI Video Security connects your store's cameras to Brother POS. Instead of scrubbing through hours of recording, you get a short list of moments worth looking at — someone lingering by the door, a vehicle you've banned pulling in, a refund that doesn't smell right — usually with pictures attached.
The same cameras also count people. Because Brother POS already knows every sale you ring, it can put those two numbers side by side and tell you things a camera company can't: how many people walked in and left without buying, how long they stood at the till, and which hours you were short-staffed.
This feature is turned on for your store by Brother POS support — it is not a toggle in your own settings. Once it's on, Loss Prevention (or Traffic Analytics, if you only have the traffic half) appears in the admin navigation. See Feature Flags for how store-level features work.
What You Need
This is the one Brother POS feature that needs equipment in the store.
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Cameras | Your own network security cameras. Existing cameras usually work — you don't have to buy Brother POS cameras. |
| A small computer in the store | A cheap mini-PC that sits on your store network and connects to your cameras. It does all the watching on-site. |
| A network the cameras and the box share | The box talks to your cameras locally, and reports to Brother POS over your internet connection. |
The small computer is what makes the rest work. It watches the camera feeds continuously, and only sends Brother POS the interesting bits: a handful of still pictures when something happens, plus anonymous people-counts. Continuous video never leaves the store.
Installers
Brother POS provides ready-made installers so you (or whoever wired your cameras) can set the box up yourself. Both are downloaded from Loss Prevention → Vision Boxes, on the Set up a vision box card:
- Ubuntu installer — recommended if you're dedicating a mini-PC to this. Cheapest and lightest option.
- Windows installer — use this to reuse an existing Windows PC in the back office. That PC needs Docker Desktop installed.
Run the installer on the box, give it the pairing code from Brother POS (below), and it takes care of itself from there. Everything after that is configured from the Brother POS admin — you never touch anything on the box again.
A single box handles multiple cameras. If you have a lot of cameras, ask support what size of computer to use before you buy.
More detail: setting up the box, cameras and zones
Setting Up
1. Register the box
- Go to Loss Prevention → Vision Boxes.
- Click + Register a box.
- Brother POS shows a connection token — a long pairing code. Copy it now; it is shown once and never again. (Lost it? Remove the box and register a new one.)
- Run the installer on the mini-PC and paste the code when it asks.
Stores that only have Traffic Analytics switched on can register a box too. The Vision Boxes tab shows whenever Traffic Analytics or Loss Prevention is on, so a traffic-only store finds it next to the Cameras and Traffic Analytics tabs, installers included.
Back on the Vision Boxes page, the box's status turns Online once it checks in. If it stops checking in for a few minutes it flips to Offline (Brother POS checks every couple of minutes, whether or not anyone has the page open), which is your cue that the box is unplugged, the PC is off, or the internet is down.
2. Add your cameras
Go to Cameras (the first tab on the Loss Prevention pages).
Fill in the Add a camera form: a Name you'll recognise (Front Door, Till 1, Back Hallway), the camera's IP address, Port and Stream path on your store network, and the Username and Password the camera itself uses. Once a box is registered, also pick which Vision box the camera belongs to. Your camera's own app or manual has these details, and whoever installed the cameras will know them.
Once the box is online it also reports cameras it finds on your network. These show up in the list marked Disabled — the box doesn't watch them yet because it doesn't have their stream path or sign-in details. To turn one on, click it, fill in Camera settings on the right (name, stream path, username and password), tick Enabled and click Save camera. You can use the same form to change any camera's details later; leave Password blank to keep the saved one.
Each camera shows a status badge — Pending until the box pulls its first picture, Online once pictures are coming in, and Error if the box is online but no picture has come in from that camera for about ten minutes.
3. Draw your zones
A zone is an area you've outlined on the camera image — the doorway, the till, the corner where people hang around. Zones are how the system knows what a movement means.
- Click a camera in the list.
- Wait for a snapshot to appear. The box uploads a still from the camera automatically; until it does, the page says Waiting for a camera snapshot.
- Drag a box on the image over the area you care about.
- Give the zone a name and pick its purpose.
- Click Save zone.
Saved zones are listed beside the image, and you can delete any of them.
| Purpose | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Entrance | Counts people coming in. This is what drives foot traffic and conversion. |
| Register | Measures how long people stand at the till — your wait-time and abandoned-checkout numbers. |
| Loiter | Raises a loitering event when a person or vehicle is spotted here. |
| Line | Meant for line crossings (stepping behind the counter, say). Line zones don't raise events yet. |
| Watch | A general area with no specific meaning. Watch zones don't raise events yet. |
Call the zone entrance, till, back_corner — not the same name as the camera it's drawn on. Zone names take letters, numbers, spaces and underscores.
Without an entrance zone you get no foot-traffic numbers. Without a register zone you get no wait times and no abandoned-checkout figures. Those two are worth drawing first.
More detail: what gets flagged — events, watchlist and risky transactions
What Gets Flagged
Everything the cameras raise lands on Loss Prevention → Security Events, newest first, as a grid of picture tiles.
| Event | What it means |
|---|---|
| Loitering | A person or vehicle was spotted in a loiter zone. |
| Plate | A licence plate was read. Plates matched against your watchlist are marked in red. Plate reading only works when the box is set up for it — ask support. |
| Transaction Capture | Stills grabbed around a till at the moment of a transaction that got flagged as risky (see below). |
The Type filter also lists Line Cross and Motion, but the box doesn't send those events yet, so they stay empty.
Filter the list by Type, by a From date, or tick Watchlist hits only to see just the banned vehicles.
Vehicle watchlist
Loss Prevention → Vehicle Watchlist is a list of plates you want to know about — a known shoplifter's car, someone trespassed from the property. Add the plate, a short reason (trespass, theft) and any notes. Spacing and capitalisation don't matter; abc 123 and ABC123 are treated as the same plate.
When a camera reads a plate on the list (the box has to be set up for plate reading), the event is marked as a watchlist hit, the entry's Last seen updates, and (if you've set it up) the register gets an alert. This is plates only — there is no face recognition anywhere in this feature.
Risky transactions
Alongside the camera events, Brother POS checks your own sales data for transactions worth a second look and lists them on Loss Prevention → Review Queue, ranked by severity: unusually large order discounts, discounts nobody approved or that a clerk approved for themselves, suspicious or unapproved voids, refunds right at a shift change, big cash refunds, drawer counts that came up short or over, and the same clerk repeatedly discounting the same customer.
Open a flag and you get the supporting numbers, who rang it, and — when a camera is watching that till — a burst of stills from the moment it happened. Then Mark reviewed, Escalate, or Dismiss as not an issue, each with an optional note. Whoever actioned it and when is recorded on the flag.
The Review Queue works from sales data alone, so it doesn't need cameras. New sales, refunds and drawer closes are checked every couple of minutes. The rules, thresholds and filters are covered in full on Loss Prevention Review Queue.
The box keeps only a few minutes of frames in memory, so only very recently flagged sales and refunds can be backed with pictures. The till's register also has to be linked to a camera on the box — ask support if yours isn't. Drawer variances and repeat-discount flags never get pictures, because they aren't tied to one moment at the till. Everything else shows the exact timestamp instead, so you can find the moment on your own recorder.
More detail: reviewing events and searching with Ask Big Brother
Reviewing What Actually Happened
Click any event tile to open it.
- The slideshow. Most events come with a burst of stills — a few seconds of pictures around the moment. Step through them with ‹ and ›, or hit ▶ Play to watch it run. This is enough to answer "is this worth my time?" in about five seconds.
- The details panel. Camera, zone, what was detected, the plate if there was one, the watchlist reason if it matched, and how confident the detection was.
- Watch full clip. Opens the continuous recording of that moment.
Turning on full clips
Full video is off until you ask for it, because it needs storage space on the box. On Loss Prevention → Vision Boxes, tick Record clips on the box. The box picks up the change within a minute, and from then on events get a Clip marker on their tile and a Watch full clip button when you open them.
Only the still pictures are uploaded to Brother POS. The full recording lives on the box in your store, so Watch full clip only plays when you're on the store's own network — from the back office, not from home.
Ask Big Brother
At the top of Security Events is a search box called Ask Big Brother. Type a question the way you'd say it out loud:
- when did someone loiter at the front step yesterday?
- show me watchlist plates last week
- loitering by the back door this morning
It works out which event types, which camera, which zone and what date range you meant, and filters the list. A line underneath shows what it decided you were asking — Showing: loitering events at the front step, yesterday — so you can tell straight away if it misread you. If it can't pin your question down, it says so and shows the most recent events instead; try naming an event type, a camera, or a time like "yesterday".
Analyze with AI
Filtering gets you the right slice of the day. Analyze with AI goes further: it actually looks at the pictures.
Click Analyze with AI instead of Ask, and Big Brother reviews the stills for the top few matching events and ranks them by how well the behaviour fits your question. Each tile gets a % match badge and a one-line description — "person in dark hoodie crouches by the step and reaches toward the ground" — with the strongest match first. Someone who merely walked past gets scored low, even though they were on camera.
Two honest limits, both worth remembering:
- It describes behaviour and clothing only. It never guesses who someone is — no names, no identification, no face matching.
- It surfaces candidates, not proof. A small object may simply not be visible in a still. Open the clip and confirm with your own eyes before you act on it.
Brother POS also has a chat assistant called Big Brother for managing products, stock and pricing. Same name, different tool — Ask Big Brother here only ever searches your security events.
More detail: alerts on the register
Alerts at the Register
High-signal events can pop up on the POS register the moment they happen, so a clerk sees "Watchlist vehicle ABC123 at front" while the car is still in the lot — not the next morning.
Set this up on Loss Prevention → Review Queue, under Real-time alert settings (click the heading to expand it).
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Watchlist plate hits | Alert the register when a plate on your watchlist is read. |
| Loitering | Alert on loitering events. |
| Line crossings | Alert when someone crosses a line zone. (Line zones don't raise events yet, so this has no effect for now.) |
| Quiet hours from / to | A window during which no alerts pop on the register. Set both to None for alerts around the clock. |
Untick an event type and it stops popping up at the till — it is still recorded and still appears on the Security Events page. The same goes for quiet hours: events during that window are logged as normal, they just don't interrupt anyone. Quiet hours follow your store's local time, and can cross midnight (e.g. 22:00 to 06:00).
Until you save these settings for the first time, all three alert types are on. Click Save alert settings after making changes.
Clerks see the alert as a short warning message on the register screen; it disappears on its own after about six seconds. It never blocks a sale.
More detail: traffic analytics — foot traffic, waits and walk-outs
Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics turns the entrance and register zones into numbers you can act on. Pick Today, 7 days or 30 days at the top.
The headline three
| Number | What it means |
|---|---|
| Foot traffic | People who entered, counted at your entrance zone. |
| Transactions | Completed sales rung up at the till over the same period. Online, phone, delivery and shipped orders aren't counted — those customers never walked past your door camera. |
| Conversion rate | What share of visitors bought something. |
Conversion is the number most stores have never had. A slow Tuesday with 80% conversion is a traffic problem — put your effort into signage, hours or promotion. A busy Saturday with 30% conversion is a store problem — you're getting people through the door and losing them inside.
Busiest hours
A bar per hour of the day, with your peak hour called out. Line your staff schedule up against this chart. If the bars pile up at 4-6pm and your second clerk starts at 6, that's your fix.
Checkout wait time
Measured from the register zone — how long people spend standing at the till.
- Average wait — the typical experience.
- 90th percentile — nine out of ten people waited less than this. This is the number that matters, because the bad tail is what people remember and complain about.
- Measured visits — how many waits went into the figures, so you know whether to trust them.
Underneath, an amber bar chart shows the average wait hour by hour. Spikes there are staffing gaps, plainly visible.
Missed opportunities
| Number | What it means |
|---|---|
| Walk-outs | Visitors who left without buying, and what share of your traffic that is. |
| Abandoned checkouts | Someone stood in the register zone for at least 20 seconds, and no sale followed within the next 10 minutes. |
| Abandon rate | Abandoned checkouts as a share of all checkout attempts. |
Abandoned checkouts is the sharpest of the three, because it's the only one that catches money you nearly had. A red bar chart breaks them down by hour: "you lost four people at the till at 5pm Tuesday" is a staffing decision you can make on Monday.
Walk-outs are noisier by nature — browsers, people ducking in out of the rain, someone asking for directions all count. Watch the trend rather than the raw figure.
Zone activity by hour
A grid with one row per zone and one column per hour, darker where it's busier. Hover any square for the exact count. It combines entrance crossings and time spent in zones.
Use it to see where people actually go. If a zone you built a display in is pale all day, the display is in the wrong place. If your back corner lights up at closing time, that's worth a look for a different reason.
No entrance zone, no foot traffic or conversion. No register zone, no wait times and no abandoned checkouts. If a section says there's no data yet, that's usually a missing zone rather than a quiet store.
More detail: privacy and the law
Privacy and the Law
Recording staff and customers on camera comes with obligations, and they vary by province and state — things like posting notice that recording is in progress, where cameras may and may not point, how long footage may be kept, and who may view it. Some places also have specific rules about monitoring employees.
Brother POS gives you the tools; it does not make you compliant. Check what applies to your store with your own legal or privacy advisor, and set your practices accordingly. Nothing in this page is legal advice.
Worth knowing when you have that conversation:
- Continuous video is stored on the box in your store, not in the Brother POS cloud. Only the event stills and anonymous people-counts are uploaded.
- Full clips are viewable only from the store's own network.
- The system reads licence plates against a list you maintain. It does not do face recognition, and the AI review is instructed never to identify a person.
- Access to all of these pages is limited to Admin and Manager users; it can't be opened up to other roles.
More detail: troubleshooting and good habits
Troubleshooting
| Problem | Likely cause and fix |
|---|---|
| Box shows Offline | It hasn't checked in for a few minutes. Check the mini-PC is powered on, plugged into the network, and that the store's internet is up. |
| Camera stuck on Pending, no snapshot | The box can't pull a picture yet. Check the camera's address and sign-in details, and that the camera is on the same network as the box. |
| Camera shows Disabled | The box found it on your network, but it isn't being watched. Click it, fill in the stream path and sign-in details from the camera's own app under Camera settings, tick Enabled and save. |
| Camera shows Error | The box is online but hasn't had a picture from this camera for about ten minutes. Check the camera has power and network, and that its address and sign-in details are still right. It goes back to Online as soon as a picture comes in. |
| Waiting for a camera snapshot on the zone editor | You can't draw zones until a picture arrives. Confirm the camera is Online first. |
| No foot traffic or conversion numbers | No entrance zone drawn. Add one over the doorway. |
| No wait times or abandoned checkouts | No register zone drawn. Add one over the till area. |
| No Watch full clip button | Either Record clips on the box is unticked on the Vision Boxes page, or you're not on the store network. |
| Event has no stills | The box was offline at that moment, or the flag was raised too long after the event for the pictures to still be available. The timestamp and camera are shown so you can check your own recorder. |
| Ask Big Brother says "keyword match" | The AI reading of your question wasn't available, so it fell back to matching plain keywords. Simple questions ("loitering yesterday") still work; try naming the event type and a time. |
| Alerts aren't reaching the register | Check the event type is ticked under Real-time alert settings, and that you're not inside your quiet hours. |
Best Practices
- Draw the entrance and register zones on day one. Almost every useful number depends on those two.
- Keep the watchlist short and current. Remove plates once the issue is resolved so real hits stand out.
- Turn on only the alerts you'll act on. A register that cries wolf gets ignored. Most stores start with watchlist hits only and add more later.
- Set quiet hours to match your busy period if pop-ups distract clerks during a rush — the events are still recorded either way.
- Review the queue on a schedule, not just after something goes missing. Ten minutes on a Monday beats a forensic dig in a month.
- Use conversion and abandoned checkouts to set your schedule. They're the numbers that pay for the hardware.
- Post your notices and know your local rules before you point a camera at the sales floor.
What's Next?
- Loss Prevention Review Queue — the ranked list of risky sales, refunds and drawer counts.
- AI Assistant (Big Brother) — the chat assistant for products, stock and pricing.
- Feature Flags — how store-level features are switched on.
- Roles and Permissions — what each role can do. (These security pages are always Admin and Manager only.)
- Activity Logs — the record of who did what inside Brother POS itself.