How to: Search by appearance

Last modified: Thursday April 04, 2024.

Using the AI-powered video analytics built into Alta Aware, you can search for footage containing certain objects (a person, or vehicle, for example). You can refine your search by looking for objects with particular appearance characteristics, such as color.

Task — Search by appearance

1. Open Tools > Search.
2. Choose Search >.
3. Select What you want to find: Any object, a Person, a Vehicle, or a Face.
4. As required, Exclude stationary objects.
5. For vehicles, people, and faces, you can search by the Appearance characteristics of the subject:
   1. Any object: search for an object detected by Alta Aware, regardless of the object type.
   2. Vehicle:
      1. Select All types or Only this type.
      2. For Only this type, choose one or more from 2 wheeled, Small/Medium vehicle, Large vehicle, or Unknown type.
      3. As needed, select Only this color, or Ignore this color for the vehicle.
      4. For deployments with License Plate Recognition, you can enable license plate matching in vehicle searches:
         1. Select Any plate, Exact match, Matches groups, Starts with, Ends with, or Includes characters from the license plate.
         2. If required, exclude all license plates in a chosen License plate group.
   3. Person:
      1. Choose the Gender.
      2. If required, choose with Bag.
      3. Select Only this color, or Ignore this color for upper and lower body clothing.

   Alternatively, Use an image to define the characteristics of the person or vehicle used in your search.

   4. Face:
      1. Choose All faces to search for all people for which Alta Aware has also detected facial details.
      2. Alternatively, Use a face image and upload an image of the person of interest that includes a clear view of their face.
6. Choose Next.
7. Select the cameras to be analyzed.
   
   1. Use Search to help find the required cameras in the list.
   2. Click to filter cameras by site name, device group name, and device name, or click to filter by label.
   3. If you have predefined them, use Camera presets to simplify adding the same groups of cameras to multiple rules.
      
8. Optionally, define an Area of interest.
   1. Click the Area of interest button.
      If you have selected multiple cameras, click the thumbnail that corresponds to the relevant view.
   2. In the main camera view, click and drag to draw the rectangular Area of interest box for that view.
      You can define multiple Areas of interest on each camera view.
   3. To create non-rectangular Areas of interest, select the area of interest, and drag the corner markers to the required positions.
9. If you defined an Area of interest, you can choose how much of an object must be in the area for it to be included in the results.
   1. Open Advanced settings and choose if the area must contain an entire object, the majority of an object, or any part of an object.
10. Choose Next.
11. Select or enter the required times and dates to search.
12. Choose Search.

The results from your search are displayed.

Task — Refining the search results

From the results of a search, you can:

1. Hover over a thumbnail to view a short video replay of the detected object.
2. Click Open video to view a clip in a larger window.
3. Similar results are collapsed together:
   1. Click Collapsed results to view each result in the sequence.
   2. You can disabled or enabled this feature from > Collapse similar results.
4. To exclude an object from the search, right-click the thumbnail and select Hide this & similar results.
5. Aware excludes low-matched results by default. To include them, enable > Show low matched results.

Task — Using Similarity search

Aware can search for more video footage containing objects similar to your initial search results.

1. For each video of interest, hover over the thumbnail and choose Select video.
2. To refine the search based on your selected videos, choose .
3. To export, share, or bookmark the search, choose Share or save.
   1. For more information, see:
      How to: Export video clips from Aware
      How to: Share links to video clips
      How to: Bookmark video clips

Task — Creating a rule from a search

You can create a rule with the same parameters as your search.

1. Click Create a rule.
2. Enter a name for the rule and choose Create.
3. Specify When the rule will apply.
4. Choose Next.
5. Select the actions taken when the rules is triggered:
   • Pop-up — a pop-up notification in Aware including a thumbnail of the triggered camera view. To receive notifications on the Alta Aware mobile app, check Also send a push notification on the mobile app.
   • Email — an email message sent to a defined user or user group.
   • External link— a shared external link that can be embedded in an Email or Webhook notification.
   • Webhook — notification via a webhook to your preferred communication system.

   Alarms are only show to operators that have access to the cameras that trigger the rule.

6. Choose if you require your operators to acknowledge the rule when it is triggered.
7. Choose Done.

Task — Search using Search History

Alta Aware stores the last five searches made by each user.

1. Open Tools > Search.
2. Choose Search History
3. Rerun the required search by selecting it from the list.

Task — Select List options

1. Click List options.
2. To display more results, enable Show low matched results.
3. To display similar results collapsed into a single results spot, enable Collapse similar results.
4. Click Done.