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If you’ve ever been tasked with finding out what a POI, person of interest, or suspicious vehicle did while loitering around your building or campus, you already know how it goes. You walk into the security room. You pull up camera feeds. And then you click, and scrub through, and click some more, trying to piece together where that person came from, where they went, and when. Meanwhile, that person is long gone. Whatever happened has already happened, and that’s not an ideal outcome.
Why is this still the reality in 2025?
Because most AI video search tools aren’t as smart as they claim to be. Sure, they sound impressive, touting that they’re “trained in millions of examples” and powered by “advanced Ai,” but in practice, most of them lean on brute force methods like color detection, fixed object labels, and single camera-level review. Will they find some people in blue shirts? Sure. Will they pick the person you’re actually looking for? Maybe. But what you typically end up with is hundreds of irrelevant results, hours wasted trying to search camera after camera, and a rising sense that your technology isn’t making your life easier.
The problem is that these tools weren’t built for reality.
They’re too simplistic. Too reliant on pre‑built labels such as “firetruck” or “red shirt person” and too limited to a camera‑by‑camera approach. They weren’t designed for searching across an entire site, in harsh environments like dimly lit areas or inclement weather. This then means that investigations continue to be a slow, error‑prone scavenger hunt.
Enter the KastleVideo® Search Engine now with Appearance Search.
This is how video search was supposed to work all along.
Our Video Search Engine doesn’t just search — it finds. The best in its class, it lets you drill down by camera, date, time, motion, people, specific-area within a field of view, appearance, object, vehicle, incursion, number plates, access events, faces and more, serving up the right clip in seconds. It’s the smartest, fastest, and most precise way to search video… because scrolling endlessly is so last year.
The latest innovation in our video search suite, which is a true time saver, is Appearance Search. You simply click an image within the field of view, any snapshot from any camera, and the system finds every instance of that person or object across every camera, every floor, every corner of your site. Instantly. Not because it’s relying on simplistic color tags or pre‑built labels, but because it analyzes the actual visual signature of the person or object. It doesn’t just find a “red shirt person” — it finds that person in the red shirt.
Here’s why it’s so much more powerful than the others:
- It uses the actual image. Not a generic tag. Not a color guess. You click the snapshot, and it finds the person or object you’re looking for.
- KastleVideo searches the whole site. Not camera‑by‑camera or only cameras connected to an individual NVR . Not one feed at a time. You click, it searches across every camera in your building or campus, or portfolio (not just a single camera or group of cameras to one NVR) and returns results in seconds.
- It’s dummy‑proof. No training required. No special setup. You don’t have to be an expert. You click, search, and get results.
The result? What used to take an hour or longer now takes seconds.
You can track someone’s path across a campus or office space instantly. You can locate a person or an object quickly and reliably, regardless of color, lighting, or camera quality. No more guessing. No more sifting. No more pulling your hair out as you review feed after feed. That’s what you get with KastleVideo Search Engine.
Now you can dig deeper with additional search parameters as you investigate. Did they get in a car? No problem, just use the license plate recognition feature to identify the plate and help you to search anywhere the car went, or notify authorities. Did they get into the building? What credential did they use? Kastle has that information right there for you to know who it was (or supposed to be) that gained access.
With KastleVideo Search Engine with Appearance Search, finding the person or object you’re looking for is now, finally, simple. It’s smart, sharp, and built for the way you work.
The long, frustrating nights of scrubbing video frame by frame? Done.
The searches that used to keep you at the office until midnight? Gone.
See for yourself how it works and how it can save you hours of headaches.