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.