Managing recognised people

Who this is for: whoever runs Noviscan day to day and wants detected faces to carry a name. Assumes: Noviscan is installed, at least one source is feeding it images, and you are signed in with an operator account at minimum. Applies from version: 0.1.3

Noviscan detects faces on its own. Giving them a name is a manual act, and that act decides everything else: what raises an alert, what is kept, what is purged.

What Noviscan calls a "person"

A person, here, is not a record you create: it is a name, and every template carrying it. A template is what the software keeps of a face in order to recognise it later — the People screen gives you the count for each name. That screen opens from the sidebar, entry People; there you click a tile to open a name's record, where its templates live (the tile is inert for a viewer account).

Two consequences, and they surprise anyone who has not read them:

Two people sharing a name are one person. The name is the identifier. Giving a template a name that is already in use does not create a duplicate: it joins the existing person. This is intended, and it is how a person grows richer as detections accumulate.
The more templates a person has, the better they are recognised. One template is enough to name them, rarely enough to recognise them in profile or in different light.

Giving someone a name — two paths

They are not interchangeable: one starts from a photo you hold, the other from a face Noviscan has already seen.

You have a photo of the person

Open Sources in the left-hand bar — the page is titled Sources and maintenance — then the Enroll a person section.
Enter the name, choose the image file, then Enroll. A progress bar follows the analysis, then "Person enrolled successfully." is shown. If the image holds no usable face, a different message comes instead — not that one.
Accepted formats: JPG, JPEG, PNG, WEBP, BMP. Maximum size: 15 MB.

A person enrolled this way is automatically whitelisted — it is the only behaviour offered here, there is no option to opt out. If that is not what you want, remove them from the whitelist afterwards from the People screen.

Noviscan has already detected the face

Open Review in the left-hand bar. It shows you the detected faces that carry no name.
Select the face to name: it is the one the screen presents, under the Who is this? heading. Faces are handled one at a time.
Pick an existing person — their name is itself the button — or + New person to name one.
For a new person: type the name, then click Confirm. The Whitelist checkbox is ticked by default: untick it before confirming if this person should not join the whitelist.

How you know it is done: the face leaves the queue and the next one appears; the "N faces to review" counter drops by the same amount. When none are left, the screen reads "No faces to review at the moment. 🎉".

A green banner confirms the assignment and names the person it recorded: "Face identified: Name." Read that name — it is the only moment when picking the wrong neighbour in the list becomes visible. On failure, the banner reads "Identification failed — try again." instead.

(In the mobile app the button reads Assign this name, and no confirmation message is shown there: on the phone, the only sign remains the face leaving the queue.)

This path creates nothing new: it names a template Noviscan had already stored, anonymously, at detection time.

The whitelist

From the People screen, each person's Whitelisted / Not whitelisted badge can be clicked to switch between the two. The change applies to every template under that name in a single act.

On the Free plan, the whitelist has a quota; beyond it, Noviscan refuses the addition and tells you so.
Suspect is not a category: it is a reserved person name. You file someone under it with the red 🚩 Suspect button of the person picker — the one that opens in Review, from an alert, or from a person's record. That name can never be whitelisted: the click forces it out of the list, and the server re-imposes the rule even if the request reaches it another way.

Groups

A person group gathers people under one name, so that a common schedule can be applied to them: the hours when their presence must raise an alert, and those when it must stay silent. It is set on the group's card — sidebar → Groups, Schedule button — slot by slot in a 7-day × 24-hour grid; there is no global switch, and everything is disarmed by default. That screen is Premium only.

Viewing groups and their members: open to every account, including on the Free plan.
Creating, renaming or deleting a group: administrator account.
Adding or removing a member: operator account.
⚠️ Any modification requires the Premium plan. On the Free plan you can see the groups and change nothing — reading stays open, changing does not.

A member is attached by name, not by an internal link: renaming a person does not carry them along into their groups automatically.

Correcting a wrong assignment

Noviscan sometimes picks the wrong person. Open the person's record — sidebar → People, then a click on their tile: that is the page listing their templates, and it is in that sense that a person has a record while not being one. There, each template carries Correct the assignment: you reassign it to another name, existing or new.

How you know it worked: no message is shown. The correction panel closes and the template leaves the record of the original person, since it now belongs to someone else. A message appears only on failure.

⚠️ Correction is done template by template. There is no global rename of a person: renaming someone means reassigning each of their templates, one at a time. When the last one is gone, the record shows "No template left for this person" and the name disappears from the list.

Deleting, erasing: what is possible, and how

Reassigning a person's templates to another name moves them, it does not erase them; when the last one is gone, the name disappears from the list (see above). That is a move, not an erasure.
✅ Erasing a person entirely is possible as of this version: their templates, the associated detections and the corresponding media files are deleted (Article 17 GDPR), and the person stops being recognised without a restart — the recognition cache is reloaded straight away. The erasure fails explicitly: it never leaves a partial result.

What it does not reach, and why: your backups, which still carry the data until their normal rotation — ⚠️ a restore must therefore re-apply the erasure, otherwise the data comes back — and your phone's media cache, which lives on the device, not on the server.

⚠️ This act has no screen yet. The People screen offers no erase button; today it is requested through the API — a call addressed to the server, without going through a page — DELETE /api/v1/people/{name}, with an operator account. A screen will come in a later version.

What that call's response must say, because it is what attests the erasure: three counts, and never a name — templates deleted, detections deleted, media files deleted. The server also answers with a code: 404 means that name does not exist; 409 means nothing was erased — in that case nothing is half-done. This page does not give you the ready-made command yet — it will be written here the day it has been run exactly as printed, and not before. Until then, your Secufor contact can make the call for you.
⚠️ The automatic purge does not replace erasure. A face with no name and not whitelisted is purged after thirty (30) days; a face with a name — or whitelisted — is never purged, however old it is. Naming someone therefore means deciding to keep their template with no end date, until an explicit erasure.

If you run Noviscan in Europe, this concerns you directly: a facial template is biometric data, and you are its controller. To honour an erasure request, this version gives you the means (above); the erasure covers the application — mind your backups separately.

If something goes wrong

"No usable face detected" on enrolment. The photo does not show a face that is sharp enough or front-facing enough. Take it again, facing the camera, better lit.
"Photo too large (max 15 MB)". Shrink the image before uploading it.
"File type not accepted". Use a JPG, PNG, WEBP or BMP.
"Enrolment did not happen; the person is NOT registered." Nothing was created: start the act again from the beginning. The message is reliable — it never claims a partial enrolment survives.
The whitelist badge will not switch. You are on the Free plan and the quota is reached, or you are trying to whitelist the reserved name Suspect, which is refused.
You cannot see the editing buttons. Your account is a viewer: reading is open to it, acting is not.

Applies to Noviscan 0.1.3. The labels quoted are those of the application in this version; if they differ on your side, your version is not this one.