Search by Import from Rules

Last modified: Tuesday October 25, 2022.

The ability to create and run rules in Alta Video is a powerful and useful feature. This is enhanced by the ability to carry out a search by importing one of these rules.

Prerequisites

Suitable rules must already be set up.

Task — Create a search by importing a rule

1. Open Tools > Search.
2. Click .
3. Select the rule to use as the basis for your search.
4. Click Next.
5. Select the type of object to find: Any object, Person, or Vehicle.
6. Depending on your chosen object selection, select further characteristics for your search.
   Person — select Only this color, or Ignore this color for upper and lower body clothing.
   Vehicle — choose All types or Only this type. For Only this type, choose one or more from 2 wheeled, Small/Medium vehicle, Large vehicle, or Unknown type. As needed, select Only this color, or Ignore this color for the vehicle.

   For deployments that have LPR configured, you can also enable license plate matching in the search.

   For license plate matching, you can select Any plate, Exact match, Matches groups, Starts with, Ends with, or Includes characters from the license plate.

   You can also choose to exclude all license plates in a chosen License plate group from appearing in the search.

   You can also Use an image in your search.
7. Click Next.
8. Select the cameras to be analyzed.
   Select All cameras, or individual cameras. Use Search to help find the required cameras in the list.
   

   If you have predefined them, use Camera presets to simplify adding the same groups of cameras to multiple searches.

   For example, if you regularly have to search for people entering or leaving your site, create a preset containing the cameras that cover these areas.

9. Select the time period to search from the predefined options, or specify your required times and dates.

   If configuring a Manual time period, you can choose to use either User time, or Camera time.

   User time is the time in your local timezone. Camera time is the time local for the chosen camera.

10. Click Search.
    
11. Hover over a thumbnail to view a short video replay of the event, or click the Play clip to view the clip in a larger window.

    To exclude an object from the search, right-click the thumbnail and select Hide this & similar results.

12. When you discover the object of interest, click the Add to selected clips.
13. Optionally, click Create a rule to define a rule with the same parameters as your search.
    1. Type a name for the rule.
    2. Click Create.
    3. Specify the When settings to apply to this rule.
    4. Click Next.
    5. Select your required actions. Select from:

       • Pop-up — when triggered, pops up a notification in that includes a thumbnail view of the camera view that triggered the rule. To receive notifications on the Alta Video 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.

       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. Click Done.
14. After you have identified a few clips that relate to the object you are looking for, click Similarity to further refine the search results.

    The more relevant clips you add to the similarity search, the better your search results will be.

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.