In one embodiment, a stream of data packets originated by a visual data source is received at an edge device in a network. The data packets include at least one of video data, image data, and geo spatial data. Next, a visual data attribute is extracted at the edge device from the stream of data packets according to an edge-based extraction algorithm. The extracted visual data attribute is vectorized at the edge device via quantization vectors. The vectorized visual data attribute is then indexed at the edge device in a schema-less database that stores indexed visual data attributes.