Search by appearance

Last modified: Monday July 28, 2025.

Using the AI-powered video analytics built into Alta Video, 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.

Watch how to search for people carrying bags:

Task — Search by appearance

1. From the toolbar, open > Search.
2. Choose Search > Appearance.
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 Video, 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 | Only these colors, or Ignore this color | Ignore these colors 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. If relevant, choose the Gender.
      2. If required, select Body state Vertical, Horizontal or Changing.

         Changing state is a temporary movement.

      3. If required, choose With /Without Bag, and optionally, Held, Dropped, or Picked up.
      4. Select Only this color | Only these colors, or Ignore this color | Ignore these colors 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. All faces: All footage where Alta Video detects a person with facial details.
      2. Use a face image: 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 templates 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 Collapse similar results to view each result in the sequence.
   2. You can disable or enable this feature from List options > Collapse similar results.
4. To exclude an object from the search, right-click the thumbnail and select Hide this & similar results.
5. Alta Video excludes low-matched results by default. To include them, enable List options > Show low matched results.

Task — Using Similarity search

Alta Video 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 Similarity.
3. To export, share, or bookmark the search, choose Share or save.
   1. For more information, see:
      Export video clips from Alta Video
      Share links to video clips
      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 Alta Video including a thumbnail of the triggered camera view. To receive notifications on the Alta Video 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 Video stores the last five searches made by each user.

1. From the toolbar, open > 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.