While many overview papers have been published for information retrieval in general and image retrieval in particular, there is a lack of paper in the literature focusing on retrieval for surveillance video. The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis on what we have ready done for surveillance video retrieval and therefore to point out what are still challenges in this domain. By supposing that there are two main types of information in surveillance video named object and event, we divide the existing approaches in the literature into two sub categories: approaches at object level and approaches at both object and event levels. A quantitative comparison of three approaches of the former category in the same dataset is also given.