Operations & Compliance

CCTV incident search and review

Search recorded CCTV by description of event, time, and location to find relevant footage for incident investigations, cutting review time from hours of scrubbing to a targeted search.

AugmentationPattern-matchingTime savingAccuracy

60–85%

reduction in footage review time

Opportunity assessment

Business Impact
2

Minor improvement. Small efficiency gain with limited effect on overall turnover or bottom line.

Feasibility
3

Moderate effort. Requires configuration, prompt engineering, and testing. A capable team can get there but expect several months.

Data Readiness
3

Moderate data needs. Works with data most businesses hold, but will likely need consolidation, cleaning, or reformatting before use.

Risk Exposure
2

High risk. Significant external exposure or regulatory implications. Requires robust oversight and clear accountability.

Change Complexity
4

Light people impact. A new tool slots into an existing workflow. Minimal training needed. Most people will adapt quickly.

Tooling required

Computer vision

Things to consider

  • Restrict this to searching recorded footage for a specific, justified investigation. Live monitoring, and anything approaching facial recognition, raises a materially different and much higher legal bar — the ICO has intervened on retail deployments of live facial recognition.

  • You will need a data protection impact assessment, a documented lawful basis, signage, and a defined retention period before deployment, not after.

  • The realistic capability is searching by appearance, object, and movement, not identifying individuals. Set that expectation with the security team or the tool will be judged against something it should not be doing.

  • Experiment starter: Take ten past incidents where footage was reviewed manually and record how long each took. Run the same searches with a description-based tool and compare both time and whether the relevant clip was found.

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