Search for loitering

Last modified: Tuesday October 25, 2022.

People or vehicles loitering are often a cause for concern. Use the analytics from your Alta video security systems to assist your search for loitering within view of the cameras connected to Alta Video.

Task — Search for loitering

1. Open Tools > Search.
2. Click Loitering.
3. Define the loitering time using Loitering for longer than.
4. Select the type of object you want to find: Any object, Person, or Vehicle.
5. Depending on your chosen object selection, select further characteristics for your rule.
   For Person:
   1. If relevant, choose the Gender.
   2. If required, select Fall detection.
   3. If required, choose With/Without Bag, and optionally, Held, Dropped, or Picked up.
   4. Select Only this colour, or Ignore this color for upper and lower body clothing.
   
   For 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.

   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.

   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.
6. Click Next.
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.
   
7. Select the time period to search from the predefined options, or specify your required times and dates.
8. Click Search.
   

   The results from your search are displayed, based on the perceived (by Alta Video) accuracy against your selected search criteria.
   Where Alta Video considers results to be very similar, those results are collapsed together. To view the collapsed results, click the Collapsed results icon on the top-right to view each result in the sequence.

9. 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.

10. When you discover the object of interest, click the Add to selected clips.
11. 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 on the Alta Video user interface that includes a thumbnail view of the camera view that triggered the rule. The Pop-up can be expanded to show more detail and allow further actions to be taken by your operators.
       • 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.
12. After you have identified a few clips that relate to the object you are looking for, click the Similarity search button 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.