Medium

The video search engine for cameras too

Carter Maslan

3 min read

· Aug 28, 2017

Find the relevant video among hundreds of cameras with camera labels that simplify search.

When security cameras span multiple rooms, floors, buildings, campuses, cities, or even countries, it’s often slow and expensive to find what you’re looking for. Camera names are often cryptic — like “D3812SL5”. But with Camio, there’s a simple way to make all your existing cameras — no matter how they’re named — easy to reference in search queries: Camera Labels.

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For example, instead of having to figure out whether the cameras “D5000VIR”, “PANO-A007”, “Tech Lab” and “D3812SL5” cover a particular office building, you can use a single-word query like [Arizona] or [Headquarters] to search only the cameras in a particular location.

Find [red cars in parking lot] or [red cars at Headquarters] without having to specify camera names.

There are three ways to label cameras:

  1. Typing as in the video above at https://camio.com/app/#live.
  2. Mapping at https://camio.com/locations.
  3. Coding with the API https://api.camio.com/#labels.

Typing

Just enter descriptive labels after selecting one or more cameras in the live view of the web app.

Open https://camio.com/app/#live, select cameras, and apply labels.

Mapping

The Camera Locations page is the map-based way to associate geographic labels with cameras. When you set the camera’s location, Camio automatically labels that camera with the city, state, and zip code of the assigned location. For example, when “20 N San Mateo Dr, San Mateo, CA” is assigned as the camera location, then the labels “San Mateo”, “California” and “94401” are all added as camera labels automatically.

Coding

The Camio API for camera labels is the programmatic way to assign labels to cameras. So in addition to permanent labels — like descriptions of the location that are assigned only once upon setup — temporary labels can be assigned programmatically based on schedules, workflows, emergencies, etc… with a single command.

It’s simple to POST a dictionary of cameras and labels with https://api.camio.com/#labels.

For example, an on-duty security guard named “Joe” can have a group of cameras assigned to him just for the duration of his shift so that he can get alerts or query for [Joe] to see important events on his mobile phone. The app or server would issue this command to add his name to the cameras at the start of his shift:

curl \
  -H "Authorization: token abc123" \
  -d '{"IPC-D56": ["Joe"], "ICP-E47":["Joe"]}' \
  -X POST \
  https://camio.com/api/cameras/labels

Camio is known as a video search engine that analyzes what happens in the video stream itself. But now you know that the query terms you enter in the Camio search box also search cameras too.