User guide

For the console release of September 2026. Written from the screens as they ship; where a screen is administrator-only it says so.

The console runs in any modern browser at https://suraag.xyz/console (or your own deployment's address) and works on a phone. Nothing is installed. Sign in with the username and password your administrator issued; there is no self-service sign-up.

Three rules hold across every screen:

• Counts are deterministic. A number the console shows was counted from the recorded detections, never estimated by a language model. Ask the same question twice and you get the same answer.
• Matches are leads. Cross-camera links, look-alike results, face and re-identification hits and AI-enhanced images are investigative leads, labelled as such on screen. A human decides; the console records the decision.
• Raw video stays with you. Footage you upload stays on your Suraag server; the cloud holds analysis (detections, crops, embeddings, plates) and nothing else.

The sidebar groups the screens into Operate, Investigate and Administer. Your role decides which you see. Ctrl/⌘+K opens Search from anywhere; the bell in the top bar opens Alerts; Upload footage opens Uploads & Queue.

Operate

Command

The home screen: a quick ask box, the day's numbers, what is being analysed right now, the latest findings and — for administrators — the review queue.

• Ask a plain-English question in the top box; it opens Search with the answer.
• Read the KPI band: Analyzing now, Objects indexed, Plates read (with watchlist hits), Alerts (unreviewed and critical) and Recent failures.
• Jump with Queue →, Library →, All → (alerts) and Manage → (watchlists).
• Open any crop in the latest-findings rail to see its detail card.
• On a fresh organisation, Upload your first video takes you straight to the queue.

Live Watch

The live camera wall for retail deployments: every enrolled camera, its status, recent motion events, the armed-hours summary and the daily Watchman digest.

• Read tile chips: LIVE (an edge device is uploading), ENROLLED (no footage yet), Armed (inside an armed-hours window), or SIGNAL LOST with the last-seen time.
• Click a camera tile to open the Library filtered to that camera.
• Scan the motion list — each row says whether the clip was analysed, auto-dismissed, reviewed by a person, and whether a WhatsApp alert went out.
• Check the armed-hours panel (day pills and the window, e.g. 22:00–08:00). Administrators change it with Edit →, which opens Cameras & Zones.
• Read the daily digest: events, alerts sent, auto-dismissed, footfall — composed by the AI Watchman strictly from deterministic counts and delivered on WhatsApp at 08:00.

Alerts

The inbox of every fired event: armed-zone intrusions, incident rules (no helmet, weapon candidate, unattended object, erratic driving, and the rest of the catalogue) and plate-watch hits.

• Filter with the chips: All alerts, Unacknowledged, or one alert type.
• View the moment opens the Viewer at the exact second.
• Acknowledge stops the escalation clock; Mark as reviewed closes it. Both are recorded with your name.
• Assign an alert to a colleague (or Unassign).
• Notify this device turns on browser push for this device; the same button turns it off.
• Severity chips read Critical, Review, Notice; a cleared alert shows Cleared; an alert nobody acknowledged in time shows Escalated.

Uploads & Queue

Where footage comes in and where you watch it being analysed.

• Drag files in or browse. Files up to 500 MB each, three in parallel; uploads are chunked and resume after a dropped connection. A file already analysed is recognised by its SHA-256 and returns instantly as Already analyzed.
• Type the investigation intent (one line — "white SUV hit-and-run near the market") and pick an analysis mode: Auto, Vehicle incident, Person or suspect, Abandoned object, Full analysis or Fast index only.
• Tell the console whether the source is a CCTV camera or Drone (aerial).
• Follow each job through Uploading → Queued → Analyzing → Ready (or Failed, with Retry). Watch live opens the Viewer while results are still streaming in.
• The right rail shows today's totals, average turnaround, duplicates skipped, and the health of every edge uploader.

While the GPU analysis engine is offline, jobs wait as Queued and run when it comes back; nothing is lost.

Investigate

Search

One box for everything. Type a question, a description, a plate fragment, or drop in a photograph — the console works out which engine to use, or you pick with the chips.

• Modes: Auto, Ask (a question with a counted answer), Appearance (a description such as "man in a red shirt carrying a bag"), Plate (a full or partial registration — plate-shaped input jumps straight to Plates), Photo (Find look-alikes from an uploaded image), Filters (structured search).
• In Filters, combine Object, Camera, Area, Event, Plate and Movement (left/right/up/down) with the attribute catalogue — who, appearance, wearing, carrying, doing, vehicle identity and condition, animals. Attributes marked (restricted) need a gated capability on your account.
• Draw area on a camera frame to search only inside a polygon.
• Ask a follow-up to refine a question; Clear this conversation starts over.
• An Ask answer shows the count, how the question was interpreted, the caveats, and per-camera "seen at" pills you can click to narrow down. Counts come from the detector.
• Weak look-alikes are hidden by default; Show N weak look-alikes reveals them.

Library

Every analysed source as a poster grid with its counts, its evidence record and (for administrators) its lifecycle actions.

• Open detections lists what was found in a video; Evidence record shows the original file name, size, upload time and user, the SHA-256 at ingest and the integrity verdict (Intact or MISMATCH). Verify integrity now recomputes it.
• Synopsis asks for a plain-English What happened here? narrative, labelled either Narrated by AI strictly from the recorded detections or Deterministic narrative.
• Filter by source type (CCTV / Drone) when both exist; posters flag AERIAL footage and the number of plates read.
• Administrators can Re-analyze or Delete a video. A video referenced by a sealed report is evidence-locked and is kept even by Delete all videos.

Viewer

Frame-accurate playback of one analysed video with the analysis drawn over it and the forensic tools alongside.

• Transport: play/pause, ±1 s, frame step (Shift+arrow), 0.5×–4× speed, and a detection-density strip you can click to seek. During playback objects are dots; hover or select to see a box and label.
• Select objects pauses the video and lets you click a box or drag a marquee, then: Search this region, Follow across cameras (opens the Dossier), Who was near, and for bag-like objects Who left this?
• Export clip and Redacted still produce shareable artefacts; Enhance opens the enhancement tools; Details shows the finding card.
• Play a local copy… plays a file from your own disk against the server's analysis without uploading it (the OSD says LOCAL FILE — NOT UPLOADED).
• Enhance keeps two lanes apart on screen: Classical enhancement — deterministic sharpening, evidence-grade and AI reconstruction — may invent detail, investigative lead only, never evidence. AI outputs carry the NOT EVIDENCE mark.

Dossier (Follow this object)

Opened from Follow across cameras. One object's whole story: every candidate sighting across cameras in time order, its route on the map, who it was seen with, and a plain-English summary.

• Sightings are banded STARTING POINT, STRONG, PROBABLE, POSSIBLE and CONTRADICTED, each with a score and its components — appearance similarity, plate match or Plate conflict, and travel feasibility ("240 m in 6 s (~144 km/h) — impossible").
• Decide each link: Accept, Reject or Unsure (recorded as Inconclusive). Every decision is audited and rejected links stay out of reports.
• Widen the search or ask for Fewer, stronger matches.
• Each sighting shows the camera's recorded time and the normalised time with the camera's clock uncertainty (±Ns).

Timeline

Play up to four cameras together against one wall clock to reconstruct an event.

• Set From and To, Load, then tick up to four cameras.
• Play/pause, jump ±10 s, choose 0.5×–4×. Click a coverage lane or an event marker to move the shared clock.
• Each pane shows which segment is playing and, where a camera's clock was found to be off, the CAMERA CLOCK … (OFFSET +Ns) correction and its uncertainty.
• Gaps are shown honestly as No coverage at this time; a window nothing covers says so.

AI Investigator

Describe the case in plain language; the investigator plans the steps, runs them on the same deterministic engines as the rest of the console, and returns an answer with an evidence pack.

• Investigate submits the brief. Steps such as Trace the subject's route, Trace who left the bag, Find what else was co-present and Identify the exit vehicle tick off as they complete.
• Review the evidence pack (each item opens in the Viewer).
• Draft sealed report carries the pack into Cases & Reports.
• Start a new investigation clears the thread.

The model plans and narrates; searching, counting and matching run on the deterministic engines, and AI-derived links are labelled leads.

Analytics

Patterns across a look-back window: an activity heatmap (by hour and weekday, or spatial dwell per camera), vehicle trends, demographics, hotspot cameras and the incident mix.

• Pick a Camera (or all) and Last 7 / 14 / 30 days.
• Demographic figures are detector estimates and are labelled (estimated); they are never identity claims.

Watchlists

Standing queries that fire when something reappears.

• Plates: type a registration, add an optional label, Watch. Hits appear in Alerts and on Command.
• Person watches: an appearance-based watch with a threshold; Pause, Resume or Remove. Hits list as Recent possible reappearances — verify visually before acting.
• Enrolled identities (administrators, where the face capability is enabled): enrol from a server-side folder; each match waits in a queue for Confirm / Reject.
• Face and re-identification matches are leads, never identifications; the screen says so.

Plates

Plate forensics: trace a full or partial registration across every analysed video.

• Trace a plate or fragment. The summary reads Seen N times across N cameras, with first and latest sighting and the best read confidence.
• Each sighting shows its read confidence (strong at 80 % and above, possible at 70 %) and any runner-up reading ("also read as … (62 %)"). Open the frame to check it.
• The route panel pins sightings in read order on the map where cameras have a location.
• + Add to watchlist turns the trace into a standing watch; Stop watching ends it.
• Partial and low-confidence reads are included as leads — verify the frame before citing a registration.

Verify

The operator verification loop: the machine's least-confident claims, one card at a time. Every verdict becomes training data for the next model.

• Per claim: Confirm, Correct (pick the right value from the catalogue) or Reject. Y confirms and N rejects the first undecided claim.
• Not a real detection rejects the whole card; Skip this card moves on; Load the next batch when the batch is done.
• Claims show their confidence; unscored claims are queued because the detection itself is uncertain.

Cases & Reports

Case files with the fields a court needs, and sealed, hash-chained incident reports.

• + New case: title, FIR number, offence, incident window, legal authority, notes and lead investigator. Status moves through Active, Awaiting review, Sealed, Closed.
• + New report: choose the source, write the title, summary and investigator notes, tick the findings to include, then Seal report with N findings. Sealing records the SHA-256 of the report content.
• On a sealed report: Verify recomputes the hash and shows Seal intact or SEAL BROKEN; Open renders the printable report; Certificate produces the Section 63 electronic-evidence certificate (Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023); Ledger shows every access to the report.
• Classical enhancements in a report are marked evidence-grade; AI outputs are marked leads. Rejected findings never enter a report.

Administer

These screens appear only for administrators. The Administrator guide covers them step by step; this is the short version.

Cameras & Zones

Per-camera rules: draw zones (restricted, no-parking, counter, entry) and a tripwire, set armed hours per weekday, choose the vertical profile (retail counts people and ignores vehicles; full runs everything), calibrate the ground plane to enable distance and speed, and see 7-day footfall and the camera map.

Users & Roles

Create users with a role and optional gated capabilities (face, weapon, re-ID); enable, disable, reset passwords; define custom roles that narrow a permission level (officer, investigator, admin) and choose which tabs it sees. Roles restrict; the server enforces.

Audit Trail

Every action, kept forever and text-only, exactly as recorded — sign-ins and failures, searches, uploads, analysis runs with duration, report seals and accesses, API calls. Filter by user, action, and time; Export as CSV. The Activity timeline view shows uploads, analyses and searches in order.

System Health

Dependency status, GPU engine state (RUNNING, STOPPED, BOOTING, MOCK), storage meters per organisation, usage per tenant, and the model registry with each head's role (evidence, lead, gated). Administrators can warm workers or start and stop the dedicated GPU pod.

Settings & Integrations

Edge devices and enrolment, alert channels (WhatsApp, email, webhook, cooldown, which alert types), retention of live clips, the AI provider, API keys for the /v1 API, and (for platform superadmins) creating organisations.

Your account

My account (bottom of the sidebar, or the user block in the top bar) is your own screen: change your password (the current one is required; the new one needs at least 10 characters), choose which alert types reach you and set quiet hours, pick your locale and time zone for how dates and numbers are shown, turn browser push notifications on or off, and see your organisation's plan and usage. Changing your password signs out every other session. Forgot it? Use Forgot password? on the sign-in screen — if your account has an e-mail address a reset link is sent; otherwise an administrator resets it from Users & Roles. A disabled account is signed out within a minute.

Getting help

Write to support@suraag.xyz with the screen name, what you expected, what happened, and the time (IST) — the audit trail lets us find the exact request. The Administrator guide covers setup; the API reference covers integrations.