Automated visual surveillance has emerged as a trendy application domain in recent years. Many approaches have been developed on video processing and understanding. Content-based access to surveillance video has become a challenging research area. The results of a considerable amount of work dealing with automated access to visual surveillance have appeared in the literature. However, the event models and the content-based querying and retrieval components have significant gaps remaining unfilled. To narrow these gaps, we propose a database model for querying surveillance videos by integrating semantic and low-level features. In this paper, the initial design of the database model, the query types, and the specifications of its query language are presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.