Uniview SeekFree AI Search Technology From BGW Technologies Changes The Nature Of CCTV Searches.

Uniview SeekFree AI Search Technology – Uniview has released SeekFree, a new AI-driven video search technology designed to change how recorded surveillance footage is reviewed and investigated, that’s now available in Australia through BGW Technologies.

According to Henry De Castro, product manager at BGW Technologies, the challenge in video surveillance has rarely been video capture.

“For decades, one of the biggest pain points in video surveillance hasn’t been capturing footage but finding the right footage when it matters most,” De Castro explains.

“Installers and integrators know the reality. When an incident occurs, end users are often left scrubbing through hours, even days, of recorded video using basic time filters, motion events, or metadata tags. In high-pressure environments, that manual process is inefficient at best and operationally risky at worst.”

De Castro says Uniview SeekFree changes searches completely.

“A new AI-driven search architecture is beginning to shift expectations around what network video recorders can actually deliver locally, and at the centre of this change is SeekFree, recently introduced by Uniview,” he says.

SeekFree is built on the Uniview Large Model and allows operators to search recorded footage using natural language descriptions rather than predefined metadata.

“SeekFree is an intelligent search technology built on the Uniview Large Model that enables operators to locate recorded footage simply by describing what they are looking for in natural language,” De Castro explains.

According to De Castro, traditional search relies on selecting fixed categories such as person, vehicle or motion detection.

“While useful, this approach rarely reflects the way incidents are remembered in the real world and matching this reality, SeekFree allows searches such as ‘A person blocking the fire exit’ or ‘Someone carrying a yellow tote bag in the lobby’ or ‘Vehicles stopping in a restricted area’.

“The system interprets the intent behind the query and retrieves matching video segments instantly across connected cameras,” De Castro says.

“From an integration perspective, this is a capability we’re genuinely excited about because it represents a paradigm shift that turns the NVR from passive storage into an active investigative tool, converting recorded footage into searchable operational intelligence – what a win!”

According to De Castro, SeekFree delivers these capabilities directly at the recorder.

“SeekFree allows integrators to deliver intelligent search capability directly on the NVR without requiring AI processing on every camera in the system,” he explains. “This is achieved through a multimodal AI framework that converts both video and operator text into semantic feature vectors for matching.”

The Uniview Large Model underpinning SeekFree has been trained on billion-level datasets and supports more than 4000 perception target categories across over 100 industry applications. In deployment, this enables searches across people, vehicles, non-motorised objects, animals, locations, behaviours, OCR-detected text and combined conditional attributes.

“Operators can even search using negation – identifying people without safety helmets in compliance-driven environments, for example,” says De Castro.

Compatibility with existing systems is another key factor.

“One of the more significant advantages for installers is compatibility with existing infrastructure,” De Castro says. “SeekFree-enabled NVRs work with Uniview IP cameras as well as third-party cameras supporting SIP or UMD protocols.”

“Because processing is handled locally on the recorder, search capability can be added without external servers or major hardware replacement.”

“For system designers managing bandwidth, storage, or privacy requirements, local processing also ensures that sensitive video data remains on-site,” he says.

The SeekFree-enabled models currently available through BGW Technologies are the UNVN502-16E-IM-G and UNVN502-32E-IX-G. These NVRs support SeekFree across up to 16 channels with third-party cameras and up to 32 channels with Uniview SIP or UMD cameras.

To learn more about UNV SeekFree click here, or visit your local BGW Technologies branch for a demonstration. You can find more SEN news here.