Camect as a video search engine?

[R Spivack]

Food for thought:

I would like to see Camect consider adding emphasis to becoming a video search engine using the ML/AI recognition features - especially as it continues to improve.

What I mean:

Instead of (or in addition) to pulling live feeds from cameras, I would like to use Camect to open a file which is a recorded video stream (standard file formats; exported from other NVR or camera systems).

Then in a Google-like query window, input a search query that includes time parameters and object parameters.

Search a specific time or period ("the last 7 days", "between the hours of 11am and 2pm everyday")

For a specific event ("a dog", "a truck", "FedEx", "a person")

Future enhancements would allow more intelligence "A white ford truck", "a small package", etc.

Live viewing, alerts, motion detection, clips, are all useful, but a lot of other systems can do that (better/worse/same as Cametc).

I see a lot of potential for a search system - a lot of people that have security cameras don't monitor them constantly or even want alerts.  But it something of interest happens or might have happened, there isn't any good way to search footage to find it easily.

Those classic TV detective shows where the police go to the "security room" and use a joystick and keyboard to search the video logs and always come up with the suspect caught on video with only a few seconds of keyboard time is still not possible.  In the real world, it takes hours of shuffling back and forth with coarse view controls to try and spot something of interest and then narrow down the time frame to drill down and see it.

[Tony Welle]

I think a slightly different use case would be easier and more useful. The current Alerts filter allows selection of input source, object type and time constraint, which could satisfy your request for a query window.

Since Camect already has a full time job processing camera streams, adding a new "External Video" filesystem based input source could be processed as just another video stream. Thoughts are to define  a CIFS/NFS filesystem where a source directory and a destination directory are defined. The source directory would contain "External Video" files to be processed in the background as an alternate video stream with the output produced being in std camect format and located in the destination  directory. The current view filter would add an "External Video" selection as an option where you would be able to choose the destination directory defined earlier and  select the query constraints. This would also allow viewing using the standard camera UI window with time controls for the "External Video" sourced data.

Thoughts?

[Tony Welle]

Piling on again...using this approach might allow a more powerful Camect based system to play a "Master" aggregator role for multiple NVR's or multiple Camect systems or a mix of the two providing a single pane of glass that contains only value added object detections.

[R Spivack]

Good ideas, I just hope if they head this way they preserve the ability to open a video file.  I really like the possibility of using Camect as a batch video file processor for searching.

The intent is I have footage already generated somewhere that hasn't been fed into any kind of intelligent NVR or AI system and be able to analyze and search it.

Real-time continuous processing might be nice, but just a batch analysis and then a query window would make it universally useful to anyone that needs to search/catalog saved camera video.

[Tony Welle]

Batch was really my intention and not to provide another real-time processor. I just wanted to expand the video source from a single file to a directory with the ability to view that content using the existing capabilities after it was processed.