March 23, 2026
Introducing Appearance Search: Find Anyone Across Your Entire Camera Network Instantly
March 23, 2026
Today we're launching Appearance Search — a powerful new capability that lets security operators find a person or face of interest across an entire camera network in seconds, without manually scrubbing through hours of footage.
Traditional video investigation is slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone. When an incident occurs, operators must manually review recordings across dozens of cameras to track a subject's movements — a process that can take hours or even days. Appearance Search eliminates this bottleneck by letting operators describe what someone is wearing, click on a person or face directly in a recording, or upload a reference image to instantly surface matching clips from any camera in the network.
How Appearance Search Works
Appearance Search combines person re-identification (Re-ID) AI with Lumeo's existing visual search infrastructure to create a seamless investigation workflow. Operators can initiate a search in three ways:
- •Describe by appearance: Enter natural language attributes such as clothing color, style, or physical description to retrieve matching clips
- •Click to search: Click on any person or face in a recording to instantly search for that individual across all cameras
- •Upload a reference image: Provide a photo of the subject — from any source — and Lumeo matches it against indexed footage across the network
Under the hood, Lumeo's Re-ID models extract rich appearance embeddings from every detected person across all camera feeds. These embeddings are indexed in real time, enabling sub-second retrieval even across large deployments with many cameras and extended retention periods. The results surface as a ranked timeline of matching clips, complete with camera location and timestamp, so operators can reconstruct a subject's complete path through a facility in minutes.
Key Use Cases
- •Incident investigation: Rapidly trace a suspect's movements following a theft, assault, or security breach
- •Missing persons: Quickly locate a missing child, patient, or elderly individual across a hospital, school, or transit hub
- •Access control compliance: Verify that only authorized individuals entered restricted zones during a given time window
- •Retail loss prevention: Track individuals involved in organized retail crime across multiple store locations
- •Event security: Monitor and locate persons of interest in real time at large public venues
Built on Lumeo's Open Platform
Appearance Search is built natively into Lumeo's no-code analytics platform, meaning it works with any existing IP camera or NVR infrastructure — no rip-and-replace required. It integrates seamlessly with Lumeo's AI Search, dashboards, alerting, and re-identification building blocks, giving operators a unified investigation workspace.
Processing runs on on-prem or cloud gateways, and matching events are uploaded to Lumeo Cloud where search is executed — keeping heavy compute local while making results accessible from anywhere.
Appearance Search is available on Enterprise plans with the Cloud Add-on, Enterprise PLUS plans, and Industrial plans.
Finding someone in hours of multi-camera footage used to mean a team of analysts and most of the day. With Appearance Search, a single operator can reconstruct an individual's entire path through a facility in minutes. That's the kind of operational leverage that changes how security teams respond to incidents.
— Security Director, Fortune 500 Company