# VESSI - VLM-Enhanced Support for Surveillance and Investigations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11674/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 130 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated video surveillance analysis has become a critical component of intelligence infrastructures and Law Enforcement agencies. Traditional systems lack the semantic module for comprehensive situational awareness and forensic tasks, limiting their ability to interpret events meaningfully or support post-incident investigations. This slows operational insight and increases the burden on human analysts. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising pathways to bridge this gap. To address this, we propose VLM-Enhanced Support for Surveillance and Investigations (VESSI), a VLM-based framework designed to enhance automated video surveillance analysis through prompt-driven interrogation of video sequences where salient visual features are converted into textual descriptions. We test our framework with four state-of-the-art models. Since most datasets for this task are unlabeled, we also propose the Composite Model Utility Score (CMUS) to assess VLM performance. Experimental results show that our solution substantially improves the analysis capabilities of human operators and enhances the flexibility of automated surveillance systems. In our evaluation, the most reliable model flagged potentially relevant activity in more than 66% of the videos while reducing review time by more than 85%, offering a practical balance between selectivity and efficiency. The model ordering produced by the reference-free CMUS evaluation was reproduced by the normal-video CMUS evaluation and matched the false-positive-rate ordering obtained from 5,909 manually referenced frames. This agreement supports the operational use of the score within the evaluated setting.