Security teams have always relied on video for answers. However, finding those answers has traditionally meant reviewing footage manually, frame by frame. Even with modern analytics, most systems still depend on rigid rules or predefined detection classes (like “person” or “car”), which fall short when teams need to search for something specific.
AI video search based on natural language queries and image similarity changes this completely. With EyesOnIt, a single snapshot becomes a powerful query that instantly finds visually similar people, vehicles, or objects across all your cameras. One image becomes a search query that identifies visually similar appearances across all your cameras, past and present.
This is the next generation of AI video analytics, and it’s redefining how organizations investigate incidents.
What Is Image-Based Video Search?
Image-based video search allows security teams to locate subjects by uploading a still image or frame from a video. Instead of relying solely on bounding boxes or pre-trained object categories, EyesOnIt generates dense visual embeddings for every frame. These embeddings describe the appearance, shape, color, and texture of what’s in the image.
EyesOnIt is powered by natural language AI and similarity learning, enabling the system to understand visual concepts, not just labels. This technology goes far beyond traditional object detection, and even when lighting, angles, or camera quality change, similarity search can find matches.
Here’s how it works:
- User uploads an image
- EyesOnIt converts the image into an embedding
- Compares it across embeddings from all available cameras
- Returns every visually similar match, even under different lighting, angles, or partial views
How Vision Language Models Power Better Video Search
EyesOnIt uses a real-time Vision Language Model to map images and language into the same feature space. This enables:
- Matching images based on visual concepts
- Understanding partial or low-quality images
- Combining text and image cues for improved accuracy
- Searching massive video archives instantly
The EyesOnIt Vision Language Model lets the system identify patterns and appearances that conventional rule-based video analytics simply can’t detect.
Benefits of Image-Based Search
1. Faster Incident Response
Investigators no longer need to scrub footage manually, reducing labor from hours to seconds. One query can retrieve:
- all appearances of a suspect
- cam-to-cam movement paths
- entry/exit points
- time-stamped matches
- and more
2. Accurate Results Without Perfect Descriptions
Sometimes all you have is a blurry clip or a still frame. Image-based search removes the guesswork. This means no need to describe clothing, colors, or objects accurately. With EyesOnIt, you can search without a perfect description.
3. EyesOnIt Works When Traditional Detection Fails
It can search across hundreds of cameras to handle look-alike queries instantly through similarity learning, which captures subtle details that static detectors often miss, such as:
- unique clothing patterns
- vehicle modifications
- unusual objects
- silhouettes or partially occluded subjects
- the same face in different locations
- vehicles with matching features
- repeated appearances of a suspicious individual
4. Powerful Visual Intelligence at Scale
EyesOnIt indexes and searches across dozens or hundreds of camera streams with on-prem performance, no cloud latency or bandwidth limits. It turns post-incident review into a database query. Instead of scrub, clip, export, repeat, investigators can simply upload one screenshot and retrieve every moment that subject appeared.
Top Use Cases for Image-Based Video Search
Below are high-impact scenarios where image-based search outperforms both natural-language search and standard video analytics.
1. Track a Suspect Across Multiple Cameras Using One Image
If an incident occurs, operators can capture a single frame of the individual and use it to:
- identify where they’ve been
- follow movement across entrances, hallways, or aisles
- find interactions or accomplices
This technology can be ideal for malls, casinos, airports, stadiums, campuses. EyesOnIt can use any of those visual cues to identify every camera that person passed, building a fast, accurate timeline.
2. Locate Vehicles Without License Plates
Traditional analytics rely on LPR or vehicle make/model databases. But many real events involve witnesses reporting only visual attributes — “white truck with roof rack” — rendering LPR systems useless.
Using similarity learning, EyesOnIt can:
- match the exact vehicle style
- ignore small variations
- find all previous appearances of that truck
This technology can be ideal for logistics hubs, distribution centers, city surveillance, and parking operations.
3. Identify Repeat Trespassers or Loiterers
When the same individual returns to a property multiple times, operators often recognize people anecdotally, not systematically. Image-based search makes it measurable, so operators can build a pattern of activity instantly. Simply upload one snapshot and find all matching events across days or weeks. This technology can be ideal for retailers, office buildings, parking facilities, and property managers.
4. Investigate Workplace Safety Incidents
Many unsafe actions are difficult to define with rules but easy to recognize visually. With EyesOnIt, operators can improve their safety and compliance monitoring by uploading a frame showing:
- a worker riding on a forklift
- unauthorized entry into a hazardous zone
- improper use of equipment
Similarity search then finds all comparable instances across the site. They can use that exact frame to search for other similar behaviors across time or location. This technology can be ideal for warehouses, manufacturing facilities, industrial environments.
Why EyesOnIt Leads in AI Image-Based Video Search
EyesOnIt is built for real-world, large-scale security environments:
- High-accuracy visual embeddings for every camera frame
- Fast similarity search at scale
- Resilient results under low light, occlusion, or motion
- Instant alerts when a match appears in live video
- Fully on-prem architecture for speed and data privacy
No other video analytics platform combines performance, flexibility, and ease of use like EyesOnIt. Combined with advanced tracking and optional natural language queries, EyesOnIt offers a visual search capability unmatched by legacy VMS analytics or cloud add-ons.
