Forensics

Security Investigation Tool

Overview

Forensics, the investigation tool, allows users find an incident needle in a camera haystack by real-time natural language search over all historical video. The whole product experience development process involves with 2 design sprints: the forensics revamp, and the in-stream forensics design, which eventually reduced the investigation time by 90% for our customers.

In this case study, instead of using a real security incident, let’s do something fun! I’ll show you a real example of how my friend, David, is able to find the missing ramen at our office by using Ambient’s Forensics feature.

Role:

Design Lead

Timeline:

2022 Q2, 2023 Q3.

Contribution:

UI/UX Design

Design System

Usability Testing

Team:

1 Product Manager

2 Software Engineer

1 Product Designer

Problem

In an enterprise company campus, many different security incidents can happen.

For example:
Person Brandishing Firearm
‍Person Falling Down

Door Forced Open
Tailgating
Loitering
Person Jumping Fence
Person Carrying Laptop
......

For example:
Person Brandishing Firearm
‍Person Falling Down

Door Forced Open
Tailgating
Loitering
Person Jumping Fence
Person Carrying Laptop
......

💭 With traditional security investigation tools, finding relevant surveillance footage for a security investigation is cumbersome. It can take hours, even days to complete a single investigation.

Opportunity

🔎 Now with computer vision, we’re able to detect entities [person, vehicles, laptops, packages, etc...] and activities [tailgating, loitering, etc] from video footages. At Ambient we store these metadata for a certain period of time. So when any incident happens, we’re able to investigate and retrieve more context of the incident, connect the dots, picture the whole story, and eventually file a case to stakeholders when escalated.

Investigation Journey

🕵🏻‍♂️Imagine you’re an investigator for a shooting incident that happened yesterday afternoon in your office building, what questions would you ask?

What’s the appearance of this shooter?
How did the shooter enter into the building?
What time did he arrive and enter the building?
Where else did the shooter go?
Did the shooter do anything else? Was there any secure asset lost or damaged?
......

Let's try Ambient's Forensics tool together and see what we can find…

Natural Language Search with powerful filters

Searching for entities or activities with powerful filters such as time, site or camera will significantly help investigators find the interested video clips.

Scrub through result card and expand to camera view

Investigators are able to scrub through the video clip preview for quick scan. Once confirmed, by clicking on the result card, an expanded camera view will direct them to the point and time when the incident happened for more context.

Find where else the shooter went to

Similarity Search allows investigators to search the person across all cameras on the same site. This helps users connect the dots and collect more evidence of an incident.