Building a Forensic Investigation Workbench for Industrial Vision Systems
nvestigating Industrial AI Systems
In most industrial AI systems, the focus is on real-time monitoring.
Dashboards display live video feeds.
Alerts trigger when thresholds are exceeded.
Automation systems react to sensor signals.
But when something goes wrong, a pump behaves unexpectedly, a fill level drops suddenly, or an alarm triggers, the real question is not simply whether the system detected it.
The real question is:
What actually happened?
Answering that question often requires reconstructing events across multiple sources:
- camera recordings
- AI detection results
- sensor time series
- actuator commands
- alarm history
To address this problem, we built Investigation Mode in the EvoLab Platform.
It is designed as a forensic workbench for industrial experiments and processes, allowing engineers and operators to analyze historical system behavior in a structured way.
Rather than presenting isolated logs or charts, the platform reconstructs a synchronized timeline of events across the entire system.
Investigation Mode Overview
The Investigation page allows users to review historical activity across one or more camera feeds within a defined time window.
Its primary objective is to transform raw operational signals into structured, explainable evidence.
Typical investigation workflows include:
- replaying video around incidents
- correlating alarms with sensor signals
- analyzing actuator activity
- capturing snapshots from recordings
- documenting findings and observations
- exporting a structured investigation report
These tools allow operators and engineers to move from raw telemetry to a coherent understanding of system behavior.
Why Investigation Tools Matter
Most monitoring systems focus primarily on detection.
However, detecting an anomaly is only the first step.
Understanding the cause requires:
- correlating multiple signals
- reviewing visual evidence
- reconstructing system behavior over time
Investigation Mode was designed to support this process.
By combining video playback, signal correlation, event timelines, and structured findings, the platform transforms distributed telemetry into a coherent forensic narrative of the system.