Appearance-based and area-based video search fundamentally change how security teams investigate incidents — reducing hours of footage review to minutes.
Traditional video search requires a security operator to know roughly when and where an event occurred, then manually scrub through footage from a single camera. Modern AI-powered search inverts this — you describe what you're looking for, and the system finds it across every camera, every site, instantly.
Kastle's Appearance Search lets operators click on a person in any camera frame and instantly surface every moment that person appears across all cameras and sites. No manual tagging, no expensive per-camera AI hardware, no wasted hours.
Area Search refines this further: operators draw a zone within a camera view and retrieve only activity from that specific area during a chosen time window — eliminating the noise of a busy lobby or common area from a targeted investigation.
This guide walks through how AI-driven video analytics work, what to look for when evaluating them, and how unified access + video integration transforms incident response from a forensic exercise into a real-time capability.