Are you tired of wasting time manually going through recorded video from your network surveillance cameras? Smart search for AXIS Camera Station Pro offers a better and more efficient alternative. Read how it can benefit your operation.
Searching through your video recordings for a specific event or object can be time-consuming work. And if you must look at footage from different cameras, the time can quickly add up. Moreover, when you review many camera scenes manually, the information overload will cause brain pain at some point. It will be easy to miss anomalies, which could be decisive for your case.
If you are familiar with the above scenario, read on to learn how to save time and effort – and reduce headaches – when doing forensic searches.
User-friendly surveillance solutions
AXIS Camera Station Pro video management software (VMS) is the heart of Axis end-to-end network surveillance systems. An end-to-end solution means all the products and software are perfectly matched, validated, and tested—and all from one supplier. These solutions make it easier for integrators and end-customers, from specification to operation and maintenance. Many organizations, including schools, retail, and manufacturing sites, have found these solutions to be a perfect fit.
AXIS Camera Station Pro comes with several video forensic search tools preinstalled, including timeline scrubbing, data search, as well as smart search with pre-classified objects and free text search. These search tools ensure users have the flexibility and adaptability they need to quickly find relevant video. For instance, timeline scrubbing is a great and efficient tool when you know when the incident happened or when something has changed in the scene, such as an object was removed from an area.
Discover smart search in AXIS Camera Station Pro
Using video from Axis cameras, smart search allows users to fully customize queries and tailor searches to meet unique segment-specific needs. There’s no additional cost, and it works with most Axis IP cameras and existing servers – no extra hardware, software, or licenses are needed. It’s also accessible from the cloud at no additional cost. Searches can be performed from the web client with easy access at any time, from anywhere.
Making searches more efficient
With smart search, the operator has a complete toolbox with the tools needed to do the job. Users can search using pre-classified objects such as people or vehicles. For instance, it’s possible to search for the upper or lower body color of a person or a vehicle color or type. This is ideal when you don’t know the time of the incident and you need to investigate object movements or find a particular object of interest. Using motion object tracking, smart search takes data from the camera for further processing on the server or on the camera itself and classifies people or different types of vehicles. To make searches even more efficient, it’s possible to apply various filters such as time intervals, area of interest, line crossing, object direction, and object size, duration, and even speed when using radar.
Free text search for greater flexibility
While pre-classified search delivers high-precision results, it cannot detect novel, not pre-defined object types. To address this limitation, free text search gives users the freedom and flexibility to search using their own words. Users can describe any moving objects in greater detail with natural language and associations to fine-tune their searches and get more results. For instance, it’s possible to search for people, vehicles, animals, and inanimate moving objects such as parcels or other deliveries. This AI-powered search tool is based on an open-source foundation model, trained on billions of image-text pairs. The model is fine-tuned by Axis for surveillance use cases, to ensure optimal performance. Free text search can efficiently locate specific events or objects, even when other search tools fall short. Searches are prompted in English and results are shown as thumbnail images, sorted by best match. An incident report can summarize the case and be shared with third parties.
Smart search, included for free in AXIS Camera Station Pro, is a very useful tool. It helps me go through my security footage, so I can quickly find what I’m looking for.
For example, when you expect a parcel to be delivered to your logistics warehouse and the courier fails to deliver but sends a message that 'delivery was attempted, but the customer was not at the warehouse'. Using video forensic tools in AXIS Camera Station Pro, I can quickly go through the video material to verify that the delivery was never made", says Andreas Ferm, Product Specialist for end-to-end solutions.
A more serious use case would be to use the smart search toolbox to search through recorded material from numerous cameras to prepare evidence of an incident that occurred. Let's say a shoplifter was spotted in a mall during a certain time, wearing a red jacket. Using pre-classified object search, an operator can quickly find recorded footage of the potential shoplifter and determine how they had moved through the premises using the person object type and clothing color classification. Once the suspected shoplifter has been found, the operator can use the included feature of ‘similarity search’ to find out how the suspected shoplifter moved between various cameras.
Practically anyone can use it
Included free of charge and preinstalled in AXIS Camera Station Pro, smart search is easy to use and even easier to get started.
“As an end-user, I only need to enable smart search for the selected cameras and it will start working”, says Andreas.
The drop-down menus let you choose cameras, time range, area, direction of travel, object type and size, and duration. You can search for humans including upper and lower body clothing color, as well as vehicles including different types of vehicles (car, truck, bus, bicycle, or motorcycle rider) and specific color.
“It’s beneficial to become familiar with the settings and how smart search can be configured and optimized to suit your system and camera setup”, says Andreas.
For example, you can use pre-classified object search to search for:
- all yellow cars at the docking bay between 9 and 10 a.m. on Friday, August 28.
- all people going the wrong way through a security checkpoint.
- all bikes cycling on the sidewalk instead of the bike lane.
- similar people over multiple cameras using a reference image.
You can use natural language in free text search to search for:
- all people carrying a blue backpack with a logo and brand
- all women walking a dog
- all people who look like construction workers
Forensic investigations of video material are often an iterative process, where you manually refine your search to find what you are looking for. That’s why searches are entirely adjustable, and you can control the object detection confidence level to get more or fewer search results.
Know the limitations to optimize your system
Smart search works on most Axis cameras but can be fully maximized using newer cameras that can perform object classification on the edge. These cameras include a more powerful processor to reduce server processing and ensure cost-efficient search. Performance can also be enhanced by adding server capacity.
“Smart search works best with scenes and scenarios that are not too “busy”, such as highway intersections or other scenes with constant movement. These types of scenes generate a lot of object detections requiring both disk space and processing power”, says Andreas.
For these busy scenes, it might be possible to use smart search capabilities. However, Axis recommends users to configure incoming filters in smart search settings to reduce the amount of data being stored and processed.
Responsible use of AI
At Axis, we understand using AI requires great responsibility and we follow strict rules and procedures to enable ethical use. For instance, free text search includes a separate Axis-developed function to moderate the prompted text to avoid the use of toxic language. A search log is also available to help administrators identify any misuse and take corrective action if needed. Furthermore, a feedback loop allows users to feedback information to Axis if they find that a word is blocked or want to suggest blocking a word.
Included in AXIS Camera Station Pro free of charge, free text search gives users the freedom to search using their own words. Get a free trial of AXIS Camera Station Pro to discover all the benefits of smart search.