How to: Create rules for appearance

Last modified: Thursday May 11, 2023.

Create a rule to alert your operators when an object (person or vehicle) enters the field of view of one of your cameras.

Prerequisites

To use Camera templates or Date & Time Templates settings, make sure you have configured them before creating the rule.

Task — Create the appearance rule

1. Choose Tools > Rules.
2. Click Add rule.
3. Type a name for the rule.
4. Choose .
5. Set the Level of importance.
   High importance rules prioritize the cameras displayed in the Video view when a rule is triggered.
6. Click Next.
7. Select the type of object you want to detect: Any object, Person, Vehicle, or Face.
8. As required, Exclude stationary objects.
9. Depending on your chosen object, select further characteristics for your rule:
   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. 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.
10. Click Next.
11. Select the cameras to be used in this rule:
    
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.
   
12. 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.
13. If you defined an Area of interest, you can choose how much of an object must be in the area to trigger the rule. Open Advanced settings and choose if the rule is triggered when the area contains an entire object, the majority of an object, or any part of an object.
14. Click Next.
15. Specify your required Date & Time and RULE ACTIVATION settings.
    If you have predefined them, use Templates to simplify adding the same date and time parameters to multiple rules.
16. Click Next.
17. Select your required actions. Select from:
    • Pop-up — when triggered, pops up a notification in Aware that includes a thumbnail view of the camera view that triggered the rule.
      To receive notifications on the Alta Aware mobile app, check Also send a push notification on the mobile app.
    • Email — when triggered, an email message is sent to the defined user or group of users.
    • External link— when triggered, Aware automatically creates a shared external link that can be embedded in an Email or Webhook notification.
    • Webhook — when triggered, enables notification via a webhook to your preferred communication system.

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

18. To configure Advanced settings:
    1. Click Advanced settings.
    2. Check Trigger alarm per object to have each detected object as a separate alarm.
    3. To record more video at the end of the alarm, specify the Additional recording time.
    4. To merge similar alarms, specify the Merge similar alarms within time.
    5. Select how the triggered rule should behave. To trigger an alarm that shows in the Alarms tool, select Security Alarm (default). To trigger as an event that shows in the Events tool, select Security Event.
    6. Click Done.
19. Choose to require your operators to acknowledge the triggered rule.
20. Click Done.