Finding someone in surveillance videos can be very time consuming Witthaya Prasongsin / Alamy Stock Photo

Finding someone in a surveillance video could soon be as easy as Googling them. Descriptions of people of interest, such as a suspect or a missing person, are normally given in terms of their height, gender or clothing. But using this information to find a short woman wearing a red jacket in a video, say, often requires scanning hours of footage manually, which is no easy task. But a new search tool can do it automatically.

The system was created by researchers at Ahmedabad …