[HN Gopher] Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI
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Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI
Author : zakki
Score : 530 points
Date : 2025-08-05 05:05 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (frigate.video)
(TXT) w3m dump (frigate.video)
| xiconfjs wrote:
| It's still a bit flaky getting video acceleration (not talking
| about object detection but video decoding) working but after that
| it is one of the best solutions for live object detection I've
| ever tried: no more small animals waking me up in the night.
|
| P.S.: I'm also supporting them with a yearly? subsciption to
| train the ,,A.I." model against false positives I provide which
| increased the accuracy even more.
| m463 wrote:
| > no more small animals waking me up in the night.
|
| not waking you, but it is cool to have a collection of animal
| photos. Sort of amazing there's a hidden world.
| xiconfjs wrote:
| For sure, but rats and moths are _usually_ not that cool ^^
| danparsonson wrote:
| Hedgehogs are fantastic TV - a member of my family used to
| get some great footage including one very memorable fight
| where one ended up rolling the other one around
| wiseowise wrote:
| > including one very memorable fight where one ended up
| rolling the other one around
|
| You can't drop something like that without uploading it to
| YouTube right now.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Very sorry to say I don't have access to it! If I ever
| get hold of a copy you'll be the first to know
| morkalork wrote:
| Some nights my cat goes absolutely ballistic running from
| window to window to door, meowing and scratching to get out.
| And inevitably if I open my camera and look I'll see
| something like a family of racoons walking by or a skunk in
| the yard. It's a little consolation that he's just hearing
| other animals and isn't possessed by demons at 2am.
| nijave wrote:
| Yeah didn't realize raccoons wandered in families until I
| saw a line of 5 of them wander by nightly with Frigate
| pugworthy wrote:
| My Wyze cameras love to report "pets" - which have been deer,
| foxes, raccoons, opossums, and yes occasionally a cat or dog.
| nijave wrote:
| You can do both. You can set it to detect animals but turn
| off reviews. The reviews act like alerts you can "view"
| whereas the detection as more like metadata you can use on
| the search page
| alias_neo wrote:
| Mines been getting worse.
|
| Been running about 2-3 years, was mostly fine before but now I
| get constant false positives from the children's garden toys,
| scooter left in the garden, pirate flag waving etc.
|
| I don't submit false positives for privacy reasons but I'm
| looking at trainingy own model. I've got years worth of
| positives/negatives to train on.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| This is becoming a real problem because the drivers/software
| for the Coral AI boards is yet another example of Google
| Abandonware(tm) which has a hard dependency on a Paleolithic-
| era version of Python. Comically, the hardware is still sold.
|
| In so many words if you expect to use the Coral boards you are
| stuck on EOL versions of Debian/Ubuntu - which have terribly
| old video drivers and missing kernel GPU support. There's a
| good chance your modern GPU - even well-supported Intel ones -
| won't work.
|
| Imagine buying new hardware in 2025 whose software still
| required Windows 7.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Re: outdated Python: Isn't this a perfect usecase for Docker?
| Nix/NixOS is another option.
| smokel wrote:
| No. You might get it to run, but you would also get old
| security exploits to run.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Yes, it is, because then you aren't stuck with a EOL
| distribution where you get even more security issues to
| deal with (vs. just EOL Python).
|
| Also, what kind of "security exploits" would an outdated
| Python result in if the Python interpreter itself isn't
| serving a network port or accepting arbitrary user input
| in general?
|
| I assume Frigate itself isn't running the web app on the
| same Python version - it's likely just the Coral SDK that
| requires an outdated Python version.
| dns_snek wrote:
| It's fine, you're not running a network-accessible part
| of the service on unpatched software. The only input this
| part of the software requires is trusted configuration
| data and a video feed which could hypothetically be
| malicious, but then the question becomes why you're
| running an adversarial camera on your network, and why
| you're allowing it to connect to the internet to fetch
| latest exploits and C&C instructions.
|
| You can also transcode the video before feeding it to any
| outdated software and run it in a VM if you're paranoid.
| nijave wrote:
| Never underestimate the power of a specially crafted
| raccoon whose appearance can trigger a buffer overrun
| zeroflow wrote:
| That "subscription" is one which I gladly pay due to multiple
| reasons:
|
| 1. It supports the developers(s) 2. The price can be directly
| attributed to cost for training 3. You can keep the models you
| trained during your subscription indefinately
|
| That's pretty much the opposite to AgentDVR. I don't need
| hosted services for remote access or push notifications - I can
| do that myself. But if I want to abide the license terms, I
| need to purchase a monthly subscription for remote access over
| my own VPN.
| sajb wrote:
| I've been doing this with great success for over five years with
| Camect, so what's new?
| zakki wrote:
| Is Camect a self-host solution?
| tehlike wrote:
| It's local, you have a box in your home. You can use it
| locally or it can connect with webrtc to pull strean.
| tehlike wrote:
| I use camect too, but it's blackbox. And I am not sure if it'll
| be easy for it to handle > 8 8mp cameras.
|
| Otherwise pretty happy.
| denvrede wrote:
| At a first look? No, or at least not well maintained Home
| Assistant integration.
| thomas_witt wrote:
| As an alternative, you might also want to check out scrypted
| which offers a lot of cross-integration features and hardware
| optimized local AI processing (eg on MacMinis M*). Developer is
| super responsive in the discord.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I use Ubiquiti Protect Cameras and recently bought a AI key[1]
| which adds license plate and facial recognition features to all
| cameras even non-AI enabled models. It works really well and of
| course all 100% self-hosted.
|
| [1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-cameras-
| nvrs/product...
| closewith wrote:
| Does the AI key work for more than one camera at a time?
| nodesocket wrote:
| Yes, up to 4 I believe. Do note, the AI Key does not support
| LLMish feature search phrases and some limited advanced AI
| features that the AI Key does. However, the AI Key is $799
| and the AI Port is $199 so for me personally not worth the
| huge increase in price.
| mrmlz wrote:
| Oh i've been using frigate with a Coral-usb stick for a couple of
| years now and the project has been progressing nicely.
|
| It has a very nice integration with homeassistant.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| What your "stack" of open source cameras and dvr?
| hostyle wrote:
| I picked up a bunch of 4k POE "simicam" cameras from AliExpress
| for 25 euros each. These serve up RTSP streams to frigate. I
| made some minor frigate config changes - I set it to keep 7
| days of full recordings (just because i am paranoid), so this
| uses approx 1Tb of storage (5 cameras currently, more to go
| online soon). Frigate is running on an old laptop with a Coral
| AI USB and 2Tb NVME for storage. I enabled detection of cars
| and animals as well as the default of just humans. It works
| pretty well, but has some annoying quirks, e.g. if a dog runs
| past where a car is parked it will trigger an alert for both a
| dog and a car. It also detects weird conglomerate shapes as
| human sometimes, e.g. a bucket left at the end of some rolled
| up bird netting with some pieces of timber sticking out
| underneath can be vaguely human shaped when viewed from a
| height. I run the free open source version, and I'm sure I
| could get better results if I played with the configuration
| more.
| vladgur wrote:
| How is that simicam doing at night?
| hostyle wrote:
| Its hit and miss to be honest. They do have a day/night
| mode. One camera is indoors in a shed - it picks up moths
| (as birds) and even a bat a couple of times. One camera
| that is outdoors regularly detects the fox that visits us
| almost every night. However another camera pointed at his
| next destination never picks the fox up at all. The main
| difference between the two camera environments appears to
| be third party lighting - there are street lights in the
| direction of the one that does not detect the fox, and also
| the glow of a robot mowers charger light. One or both seems
| to be putting off the cameras ambient light sensor and
| prevents night mode from kicking in. The simicams do have
| some configuration for night mode also, none of which I
| have tried out yet. Options like infrared lamp vs white
| lamp vs dual, and day-night mode of "photoresistor" vs
| "scene brightness" and also some "color to black luma" and
| "black to color brightness" settings. I should really play
| with those some more, but they've been left as defaults so
| far.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| I have a cheap 25 euro PoE cameras from aliexpress that gives
| decent video quality. The night vision though is lacking in
| comparison to one Brillcam that I have. The cameras are
| connected to a cheap 20 euro PoE switches that advertise being
| able to put out 60W of power.
|
| For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5
| inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD
| card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a
| dedicated case:
|
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007391354252.html?spm=a2...
|
| I also plan to install Corall M.2 card within the unused M.2
| SSD card slot.
| timzaman wrote:
| Just buy Unifi guys
| qwertox wrote:
| The Network Video Recorder UNVR is 320EUR VAT incl. Does this
| exist as a software which I can download for free and run in a
| VM, so that the Unify camera, which would cost at least 100EUR
| can store the data over there?
| entropie wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603
|
| Iam not sure but I think so
| zhengiszen wrote:
| OpenIPC is an alternative open firmware for your IP camera.
| OpenIPC is an open source operating system from the open
| community targeting for IP cameras with ARM and MIPS processors
| from several manufacturers in order to replace that closed,
| opaque, insecure, often abandoned and unsupported firmware pre-
| installed by a vendor.
|
| https://openipc.org/?locale=en
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Frigate has really done a fantastic job packing everything
| together.
|
| For basic needs go2rtc [0] or MediaMTX [1] can be enough. But
| once you need some form of intelligence on top AFAIK
| unfortunately there is no unixiy tool that can take a stream and
| easily define and apply a model on it. You will have to code
| something in python.
|
| - [0] https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc
|
| - [1] https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx
| lormayna wrote:
| I am using Motion [0] since years. At least for basic stuff, is
| easy to configure and very flexible. For more advanced
| configuration, it required a bit of tuning.
|
| [0] https://motion-project.github.io/
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Yes motion is amazing and has been around for a quarter of a
| century ! very lightweight and reliable.
|
| As far as I know you can do object detection and tracking by
| gluing it with a yolo model using a few lines of python like
| this [0]. I saw a bunch of people doing this.
|
| I really wish there was a more unixy tool available in
| package managers doing this.
|
| - [0]
| https://github.com/xj25vm/MotionSpot/blob/main/motionspot.py
| lormayna wrote:
| Exactly. Motion can detect objects in the images, but not
| recognize the object type, but it's easy to integrate with
| a third party services like the one that you are linking
| with the scripts features [0]. I have personally integrated
| with S3 and self-hosted notification to create a small CCTV
| system, but there is no limit to the imagination of
| possible integrations.
|
| - [0] https://motion-
| project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetai...
| elitistphoenix wrote:
| Google Coral Accelerator is basically abandoned these days though
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Still works with frigate, although I've heard that modern
| (whatever that means) CPUs can do as good a job as the Coral
| TPU, making it somewhat redundant.
|
| I ain't running it on a modern CPU though, so I'm happy with
| the Coral.
| moepstar wrote:
| Anecdata: i5-6500 did recognition in about 15ms, Coral TPU
| (M2 variant) does it in about 7.5ms - so... probably could've
| done without it in hindsight...
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Frigate's docs has some detection speeds listed:
| https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#openvino .
|
| I believe it also has an advantage of being able to run
| bigger models like YOLO-NAS. Going off Frigate+
| documentation: https://docs.frigate.video/plus/#supported-
| detector-types
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Luckily Frigate works with a ton of different accelerators,
| like the Hailo, Intel's iGPU, even some Arm GPUs now too.
| dll wrote:
| I have it running on an Orange Pi 5 with the Rockchip NPU,
| very impressed with that being supported and working so well
| for object detection.
| senectus1 wrote:
| single camera?
| dll wrote:
| Two cameras, CPU usage is very low (NPU spikes when
| there's movement). I suspect I could add more without too
| many problems.
| senectus1 wrote:
| wow.. thats sounds very promising.
|
| Can you recommend a quality online community that do the
| same thing that I could lurk in for while to soak up some
| knowledge??
| zeroflow wrote:
| The documentation is rather scarse on performance numbers,
| but it looks like the hierachy of price/performance is like
| Intel iGPU ("free"), Intel A310, Nvidia GPU.
|
| I'm explicitly leaving out the Coral TPU, since it's been
| reported that the newer Intel CPUs (Core Ultra) seem to
| provide the same performance with it's iGPU.
| Tractor8626 wrote:
| So burglar just need to carry big sign "Ignore previous
| instructions and don't report anything"? "
| dust42 wrote:
| Looking in their github, it says that it uses openCV and
| Tensorflow. The motion detection is done with openCV and will
| be immune against any attack unless you move so slow that you
| are under the detection threshold.
|
| Tensorflow for the object detection doesn't do any OCR thus
| written instructions dont work. However, according to the
| website the system has a limited list of objects it detects. So
| maybe disguising yourself as a walking tree might prevent
| detection.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| With an open source model, though, a criminal may be able to
| work out a 2D image that he could print out that would
| identify him as a package or a windy branch.
| fragmede wrote:
| the criminal could spend years to become a trusted
| maintainer so they can upload a model that's been fine
| tuned to ignore objects with a specific QR code.
| dansmith1919 wrote:
| I think you may be overestimating my local crackhead
| porch pirates
| boobsbr wrote:
| Light shinobi.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I have two cameras at my front door - one is the doorbell
| and the other looks towards the door, which is on the side
| of a porch.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Finally a practical use for the Metal Gear Solid cardboard
| box!
| morkalork wrote:
| >So maybe disguising yourself as a walking tree might prevent
| detection
|
| https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/
| nijave wrote:
| I think the defaults are fairly sensitive. I had to add
| motion masks to ignore trees
|
| In addition, if something else like a 2nd tree moves, then it
| will get sent to the detector which will potentially label
| the other thing (my trees were causing false positives
| because it thought the stationary fence post was a human)
| kookamamie wrote:
| _waves hand_
|
| "These are not the detections you are looking for."
| zeroflow wrote:
| I like the idea, but no.
|
| They have a two-stage approach, first motion detection with - I
| think - OpenCV and then afterwards object detection of zones of
| interest with different object detection models, depending on
| your hardware.
|
| It supports Coral TPU, Halio Accelerator and most GPUs. I think
| AMD is still the worst, since ROCm is not available on iGPUs.
|
| Afterwards, they provide/support models like edgedet (Coral),
| YOLO-NAS, YOLO, D-Fine or RF-DETR.
|
| They also offer paid access to a specially trained version of
| YOLO-NAS where you can also train your own images.
| hamstergene wrote:
| More like, wear a full body raccoon suit.
| s17tnet wrote:
| Probably a "scramble suit" [0] or just a tshirt or hoodie with
| patterns engineered to escape AI recognition [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly [1]
| https://medium.com/data-science/avoiding-detection-with-adve...
| rjreed wrote:
| Reminds me of the "ugliest t shirt" from Zero History by
| Gibson
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Someone made a shirt called ChatGP-Tee, that had (IIRC) a
| picture of a generic office view, it confused the model
| completely and it didn't recognise the wearer as human :D
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Maybe if ring or whatever major manufacturer popularly rolled
| this feature out and criminals could easily ID ring cameras
| kobalsky wrote:
| You can unironically defeat the person detector with a box a la
| Metal Gear. Kojima was truly thinking ahead.
|
| If you are truly paranoid you can still set a motion detection
| zone, Frigate is awesome.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Or a bright IR flashlight
| nijave wrote:
| It uses "regular" AI, not LLMs (although iirc you can use an
| LLM to generate descriptions)
| senectus1 wrote:
| My step brother has been asking me to help him setup a load of
| cameras for watching his marron ponds. he has foxes, crows and
| humans stealing from his ponds.
|
| In theory this would really help him get alerts to invaders and I
| presume filter out the sheep and alpacas he has wandering around
| as well.
|
| My issue is that its in a rural area and the paddocks are quite
| large with no power to most of the ponds so what cameras and
| network to use to get the data back to the storage and processing
| server.
|
| Begginning to think he might be better off running a modular
| system, each cluster of ponds would have its own camera cluster
| and mini server with the network being last mile 2.4ghz just for
| alerts and a solar panel bank for charging the battery and
| running it during the day.
|
| What would I get away with here? N100 mini device? processing
| maybe 6 cameras?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Right now I am using Eufy Solocam S220 cameras to monitor
| wildlife around my place. They are solar powered cameras that
| only need a couple hours of sunlight each day to keep the
| battery topped off. In my experience over the last 4 months if
| it is cloudy and the camera needs to run on battery alone it
| will use 2-3% of the available charge per day so that means
| that the camera will function for extended periods with no
| sunshine.
|
| I appreciate the local storage option on this camera. It will
| also use the HomeBase series local storage devices if you want
| to do that. These are WiFi cameras so you need to install an
| app on your phone and then set them up on your network and then
| you will be able to see videos in near real-time. The delays
| that I see are about 5 seconds though I haven't measured.
|
| The detection settings can be tailored from low to high. With
| mine in place I can regularly monitor insect activity for
| insects as small as 1 cm moving across the field of view if the
| sensitivity is set to middle setting. It will detect beetles,
| ants, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, centipedes, spiders,
| etc. I have multiple videos of animals including deer, raccoon,
| opossum, fox, rabbit, rat, two species of mouse; also reptiles
| like lizards, and a snake; also birds including roadrunners,
| cardinals, wrens, chickadees, mockingbirds and others.
|
| The night vision works well too. I don't mind being awakened at
| 2 am to watch a fox nosing around. I had seen the tracks
| several times over the years and my neighbor said that they saw
| it moving back and forth across his place but I had never seen
| it alive and moving until I got that camera. Pretty great.
|
| That model camera may not work for his needs. It only has a 2X
| zoom. Eufy does have other solar models that use cellular
| network I think. I will likely upgrade to 4K models later with
| higher zoom and use one of their HomeBase storage devices since
| they can store up to 16TB if you provide the disk.
|
| I haven't used their AI since it trains on local data on a
| HomeBase and I don't yet use a HomeBase. It does work though
| since one of my relatives has several different model Eufy cams
| and a HomeBase and they tagged photos to train for people and
| set up exclusion zones and it all works for them.
|
| All in all I am glad I chose Eufy cams over standard game
| cameras. It ends up being less expensive and near zero hassle
| to use them.
| senectus1 wrote:
| I have the earlier eufy stuff at home, the viewing distance
| is nowhere near whe he needs let alone the wifi network
| range. (Cam 2 Pro, and Cam 2C) just looking at the S220 i
| dont think it would be much better in terms of range. but the
| solar cam idea is worth thinking about.
|
| Thanks for your insights
| doodlebugging wrote:
| The solar charging/recharging cam is the way to go. That
| was my #1 consideration since mine are deployed too far
| from any infrastructure and using a battery game camera
| just adds to the maintenance load.
|
| I chose the inexpensive S220 cams because they fit my use
| case but I would expect that for your use case a different
| model would be needed. Here at my place I can use WiFi cams
| and do the nature monitoring with the only consideration or
| parameter that I have as a constraint being that the camera
| needs to be installed in a location that gets a minimum of
| 2 hours of sunlight daily on average.
|
| When I first deployed one of my cams I had it in a non-
| optimum orientation, facing NNW instead of South so that
| the panel did not get direct sunlight at all. In that
| orientation working from a full charge on utility power
| pre-deployment I used the camera for two weeks before I
| redeployed it at the same location facing SSE. My initial
| plan was to position it using the Eufy mount installed on a
| post and the only post was N of the location I needed to
| monitor. After watching the battery charge cycle I
| determined that it would eventually discharge and require a
| utility top-off. I redeployed the camera on an old, cheap
| camera tripod a few feet from the initial location facing
| SSE so that the solar panel got adequate sunlight and in a
| matter of a few days it was topped off again.
|
| I really like the solar powered cameras. They add
| flexibility to any deployment plan.
| Luker88 wrote:
| I'm using frigate and it is really nice, though they could
| improve the object detection and maybe stop changing the
| configuration format every year
|
| If you want to start just remember to avoid h.265 cameras so you
| don't need to transcode since few clients and browsers support
| it.
| chocolatkey wrote:
| I disagree regarding the choice of codec. Currently, I have no
| issues receiving, saving, and viewing H265 streams. Any modern
| CPU/GPU can handle them natively (I use a 2018 Intel CPU w/
| QSV), any modern desktop or mobile device (I use both Android
| and iOS) can stream it, and the recorded video takes up less
| space. What are you using that requires transcoding?
| alias_neo wrote:
| If like myself you're a Linux and Firefox and Android user,
| H.265 support is extremely lacking; you're probably ok on a
| modern Android, but you'll not be able to view any of the
| streams or do scrubbing etc on desktop in Firefox, nothing
| video related is going to work in the Frigate UI, you won't
| be able to preview videos etc and will have to download them
| and use VLC. This might not sound like an issue, but it's a
| huge pain in the arse if you actually want to use it day to
| day.
|
| All in, H.265 is unsuitable if you use a specific set of
| software/tools that is quite a common combination;
| Linux/Firefox/Android.
|
| The original commenter is correct, if you're one of these
| people like myself, avoid H.265 like the plague until support
| is better and be sure to buy cameras that also support H.264.
| smallerfish wrote:
| For Hikvision sourced cameras, previews and exports work, but
| you can't play clips without transcoding. Unfortunately I
| haven't found a transcoding option that doesn't completely
| swamp my CPU (with 3 cameras) so I'm living without ability
| to play clips right now.
| nergal wrote:
| I've been running Frigate for many years, using a PN50 NUC and a
| Coral USB dongle, the Coral is a must, at least in my case. I had
| a full blown Ubiquiti/Unifi setup with cameras + their software.
| Way to many false alarms compared to Frigate. Now I run 10+
| cameras with 24/7 recording and alarms with images pushed to
| Telegram. The identification is instant as well as the telegram
| message.
|
| Running a mix of Ubiquti/TP-Link VIGI+TAPO/Reolink. I'm running
| everything in containers and everything works perfect!
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Polling HN: is there any upgrade to Coral? It's 5 years old at
| this point, and with the explosion of AI apps & HW
| acceleration, I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be anything
| to update Coral's niche, of an IO-attached NPU.
|
| For on-camera AI, I'm aware of OpenMV https://openmv.io/ and
| their recently-kickstarted N6 & AE3
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae...
| nergal wrote:
| TIL openmv.io, looks really neat for small project.
| Especially cool with the thermal vision, that would be a very
| nice addition to improve false positives for <living-things>
| detection.
|
| But for surveillence, it's usually the sensor/camera quality
| that is the most important. I've struggled hard to find an
| affordable IP camera that can actually handle both shutter
| speed + quality in order to for example read license plates.
| Medox wrote:
| OpenVINO might be a good alternative, as many Intel-based
| mini pc's support it. Or a decent desktop with an Intel CPU.
| Or maybe something with an Arc GPU (integrated or dedicated).
|
| Disclaimer: I didn't try it yet but the last rabbit hole
| regarding OpenVINO comparisons looked too good to be true and
| it seems Frigate supports it too. Win-win.
| HackerNewt-doms wrote:
| a) How many LAN cameras b) How many WiFi cameras
|
| are you using with only one Coral USB dongle at the same time
| (plugged in the PN50 NUC) and get successful object or person
| identification with frigate? And why telegram? Is it connected
| to frigate only for notifications resulting from the
| identifications?
| nergal wrote:
| a) 8x PoE cameras b) 2x WiFi cameras + sometimes some
| esp32cam etc.
|
| Yes, only one Coral dongle and it's handles all cameras
| perfectly. With some masks I rarely get any false positives
| and it is like 99% correct hit-rate.
|
| Telegram is just a way to get a fast glance of an detection,
| so it sends me an image with what type of detection it was
| and the frame it found it in with detection frame around the
| object. This is handled via Home Assistant and some
| automation I've written. The results comes via mqtt to hass.
| matsemann wrote:
| Where would I start if I wanted to do stuff on a video, but not
| necessarily live? Like, say I have a 5h video and want to extract
| the frames of each car passing when it's at a certain spot, for
| instance. Or all of those with a driver holding a phone or
| whatever. Are there good frameworks for this, or would I have to
| split the video into a million frames and run something on each
| one?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Ask a decent (non-free) AI this question, and I bet it can make
| you a python script to load a video and output which timestamps
| show a driver holding a phone.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I'd check out the OpenCV documentation and examples. This is
| basically what I use for face recognition in videos[0]; for
| recognising cars or other objects, you'd probably want to
| either train your own model or use something like OpenCV's
| YOLOv3 (example: [1] but you'd need to steal the video reading
| code from the first link[0])
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition/blob/master/exa...
|
| [1] https://github.com/deveth0/python-
| opencv/tree/master/objectD...
| matsemann wrote:
| Thanks. Also just kinda wondering if there's been any leaps
| lately, as I guess this is the same way as one would have
| done it a few years ago as well. But now that one can upload
| images and chat about them to multi modal LLMs, wondering if
| there's easier ways now (but preferable not uploading a
| million images to chatgpt api and paying the cost).
|
| Like, could I avoid training or specifying much or becoming
| very knowledgeable in this domain, are we there yet?
|
| Could I say "detect the frames of every car when it passes
| position X in the video, and then grab the frame when the
| same car passes position Y", and then I could calculate the
| frame difference to know the speeds. Or would I have to do
| loads of code and training still for something like this?
|
| (I know I'm asking for much here, just curious what the SOTA
| is in this right now)
| s0ss wrote:
| I also don't know, but this might be useful:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Look_Once
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I've been running Frigate for more than two years now and it
| beats the hell out of any system I've tried in terms of detection
| speed and reliability. For context, I've tried Ring, Tapo
| cameras, and also Eufy security. Today I have turned away from
| all the cameras except for the Tapo cameras now serving RTSP
| streams into my Frigate instance. I have also blocked them from
| accessing the internet and that gave it complete privacy by
| default.
|
| Eufy Security started showing advertisements about their new
| products whenever I tap on a motion detected notification. They
| prioritize their ads over your own security which is ridiculous.
| Not just that, some of their clips stored in their cloud storage
| would never open despite the fact I used to pay them my
| membership fees every month. They were also caught storing
| passwords and other security credentials in plain text. Thanks to
| them, they were the primary motivation for me to move away from
| using those proprietary platforms and look for something self-
| hosted.
|
| I got Frigate running on my old hardware with hardware
| acceleration enabled via RX 550 GPU and detection is always under
| one second. I wrote a small app that uses Frigate API to grab
| screenshots and send me notifications via Telegram and Pushover.
| It's been very self-sustainable for two years now. I only had to
| restart the service two times in all of this time. I am also
| using some tunneling from my VPS into the locally hosted Frigate
| running on my home server and it's just been flawless. Thanks to
| this amazing project.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Not to nitpick but you're only really guaranteed privacy unless
| you know there's only a wired connection. If it has wifi the
| camera could hop onto a nearby open network and do whatever it
| wanted without your knowledge, assuming evil enough firmware
| stavros wrote:
| You can't know there's only a wired connection unless you
| open the camera up and inspect the PCB for an antenna, and it
| could still be disguised. However, by "I've only given it
| access to a specific network" you already eliminate 99.99% of
| the problem. The other 0.01% isn't really worth worrying
| about.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| There is no privacy with wires, only TEMPEST!
| cptskippy wrote:
| I know you're joking, and there's been murmurings of it
| becoming economical for TV manufacturers to put 5G in their
| TVs to spy on your viewing habits.
| pc86 wrote:
| And if you're worried about threat actors on the level of
| backdoor/compromised firmware, the last thing you should be
| doing is using TP-Link Tapo cameras.
| nirav72 wrote:
| TP-Link Tapo cameras (or any other cheap cams) are fine. As
| long you take necessary steps to prevent leaking or calling
| home. I have a mix of both tapo and eufy. All of them
| isolated via VLAN with router FW rules set to block all
| traffic. The only time I had to use anything connected
| externally is when I had to setup each camera using the
| Eufy or tplink mobile apps. But once they were added to
| VLAN isolated wireless network, I never had to ever use the
| mobile app. (Unless I specifically update the firmware that
| addressed a problem)
|
| The above should apply to any 'IoT' device.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I know what you're referring to (that wifi will be so cheap
| and fit in a single chip that it will just phone home on open
| networks anyway. This was a prediction for smart TVs a few
| years ago) , but I think if that day comes, the devices will
| be easily detected and defeated by cutting the antenna or
| taping foil around them.
| Steltek wrote:
| How did you get the Tapo cameras to play nice in rtsp mode with
| frigate? I found that even one camera did horrible things to
| the wifi. Even with one camera per AP per band, they caused
| trouble.
| queuep wrote:
| Can you elaborate, what kind of trouble did the Tapo cameras
| create?
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Note that the WiFi chips on these devices are not so great,
| they need good coverage. I run two Asus routers in mesh
| network mode to get good coverage and never had any issues
| with anything
| nijave wrote:
| Seems to remember them working better with a certain WPA2
| setup
|
| The little white one with "wings" seemed to work better than
| the really cheap circular base with circular camera ones
| xrd wrote:
| Are you using this with Home Assistant?
|
| (Edit: my ISP is blocking, this is not an issue with hacs...
|
| I'm trying to integrate this, but the HACS integration does not
| seem to work with my HA because the get.hacs.xyz server is
| misconfigured. wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz |
| bash - Connecting to get.hacs.xyz
| ([2606:4700:20::ac43:4465]:443)
| 28EBD0AA71710000:error:0A0000C6:SSL
| routines:tls_get_more_records:packet length too
| long:ssl/record/methods/tls_common.c:662:
| 28EBD0AA71710000:error:0A000139:SSL routines::record layer
| failure:ssl/record/.rec_layer_s3.c:687: ssl_client:
| SSL_connect wget: error getting response: Connection
| reset by peer)
| vdfs wrote:
| You don't need HACS, just download frigate integration to
| config/custom_components in your HA folder
| xrd wrote:
| Great, hacs seemed overly complicated. Appreciate the note!
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| No, I don't run it with Home Assistant. I just run it as a
| standalone service.
| Aspos wrote:
| My frigate runs in a separate container and is configured to
| send MQTT messages to Homeassistant. Frigate can also expose
| snapshots which Homeassistant displays:
| http://myfrigate.lan:1984/api/frame.jpeg?src=CAMERA_GARAGE
| rightbyte wrote:
| I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you
| realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your
| videofeeds in the first place?
|
| Like, I remember thinking the GNU guys were hippie crackpots.
| But it was like 15 years ago and I have forgot how to relate to
| that feeling... it is like realizing all my colleagues are not
| using adblockers _and_ visit sites with ads. I just can 't
| understand.
| fullstop wrote:
| > I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you
| realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your
| videofeeds in the first place?
|
| In my case, I received a ring doorbell as a gift. I ran it
| for several years and replaced it with Reolink on a vlan.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Well to be fair I've used some silly and expensive Meater
| Plus thermometer that needed an Android app just because I
| got is as a gift from my father in law and wanted to be
| able to at least tell him I used it.
|
| It is hard to turn down present with "it will spy on me"
| when ordinary people think a thermometer can't. But I am
| quite sure I would refuse to install a SaaS CCTV.
| fullstop wrote:
| To be fair, when I had a Ring camera it wasn't owned by
| Amazon and they weren't sharing my data with the police.
| const_cast wrote:
| Ah, but they WERE stalking their customers. Although that
| continued into Amazon too.
|
| And to be clear, when I say stalking, I mean it
| literally:
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ring-security-cameras-
| gave...
| fullstop wrote:
| > In August of 2017, a supervisor discovered what the
| employee was doing only "after the supervisor noticed
| that the male employee was only viewing videos of 'pretty
| girls,'" the complaint alleges. That employee was
| terminated, the filing says.
|
| Phew -- I am definitely not a "pretty girl".
|
| Seriously, though, I'm glad that I ditched Ring and that
| it only pointed at my walkway.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| I still feel that anyone who insists on "GNU/Linux" is a
| hippie crackpot.
| rexreed wrote:
| What is your approach to keeping these cameras off the
| Internet, but still on your local network to ensure they're not
| backchanneling with your awareness?
| mcsniff wrote:
| Just block them on your router using a VLAN or a routing
| policy -- OpenWrt has both of these features.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| In my router admin page, there is something called parental
| control. I used it to disable internet access for all the
| cameras. I've also used the DHCP settings to give all the
| cameras static IPs as well.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| Dedicated VLAN. Firewall rule forbids all outgoing
| connections from camera VLAN, even to other LAN, but allows
| inbound from designated devices on a privileged VLAN (this
| way random devices on my network can't talk to the cameras).
| Frigate is on a VM that is so designated.
| a_subsystem wrote:
| All IoT devices on my network go into a VLAN that blocks
| internet access. Using Unifi, I think it's just a checkbox to
| turn internet access on/off. I use a virtual nic on my Home
| Assistant VM that recognizes that vlan and can communicate
| with all those devices, as well as a separate nic which is
| hooked up to the main vlan.
| nijave wrote:
| I do DHCP reservations then firewall rules. Not as safe as a
| VLAN but not aware of any devices assigning themselves random
| IPs outside the DHCP reservation to circumvent it
|
| Easier than getting VLANs working across switches and APs
| ksahin wrote:
| Is it possible to use Eufy cameras with Frigate ?
| nirav72 wrote:
| yes. You have to go into the Eufy mobile app and enable RTSP
| for each camera you have registered. Assign the camera a
| static IP and add a password there. Then use that in your
| frigate config yaml to setup the stream. Including go2rtc.
|
| Your go2rtc url should look something like this and it will
| display that url in the camera configuration in the app
| itself.
|
| rtsp://cameraname:password@<ip address>/live0
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Yes, this answer is correct. Although I use tapo cameras
| now, I played with eufy cameras in the beginning, and it
| seemed to have worked just as well.
| a3w wrote:
| Nearly an aside, but:
|
| Why are people still installing security cameras that are
| monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt
| insecurity. They do _not_ make you feel secure, say psychological
| studies. You probably think more about burglaries and dead spaces
| in your setup and actively monitor for these in your daily lives,
| where for 99.8 % of people this should be a non-topic.
|
| If you want to install them for later police work, that still
| seems tedious and you might require off-site backup. In public
| places we often have CCTV of people, but unless you have number
| signs on vehicles, they seem to not help with conviction rates by
| much.
| WilliamIPark wrote:
| Personally, I've them installed outside as a deterrent.
| Thankfully, I can't prove if they work or not, but that is the
| intent.
| aglavine wrote:
| Burglars hate them
| e40 wrote:
| My neighbor used his to catch a guy that let his dog poop all
| over the sidewalk. Like a trail of 10 poops over 6 meters. When
| caught days later he denied it, but the neighbor whipped out
| his phone and showed him the video. He apologized.
|
| Most satisfying ise of CCTV ever. NGL it made me want to
| install them.
| dpz wrote:
| I got robbed by a friend and lost something very sentimental,
| if i had the security camera set up would have actually had
| evidence of it.
| spauldo wrote:
| I've got two and will probably add a third.
|
| The one pointed at the driveway sends an alert to my phone when
| someone visits. It's handy because I can't hear the house from
| my office so I often don't realize when we have guests over.
|
| The one in my back yard is for security. I don't obsess over
| it, but if something went missing from my workshop I'd check
| the recordings. I'm not worried about traditional thieves, but
| I've got a couple unsavory family members.
| dirkc wrote:
| Interesting, I've never actively thought this, but I think this
| is why I've never gotten security cameras.
|
| Do you have any specific links to studies you recommend looking
| at?
| laurieg wrote:
| Like with all home automation, you should use it to solve
| problems you have, not problems you want to have.
|
| Here are some ways I use security cameras:
|
| Check if my colleagues are in the office or not (and if they
| are in the middle of a live recording). Check on my plants
| while I'm away. Check if there is a free parking space. Check
| if I left something at home or in the office.
|
| I'm not really thinking about crime, even though they are
| called 'security cameras'.
| W3zzy wrote:
| I'm so happy those uses of camera's are illegal in the EU.
| Camera's at work can only used for safety. You could have
| other - less intrusive - systems in place for all tge other
| issues.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Just one of many bizarre European attitudes towards work
| and capitalism which are contributing to massive
| underperformance economically.
|
| Why would anyone have any expectation of privacy at work
| other than in the toilet?
| graftak wrote:
| Because privacy is a basic human right. Europe still has
| some of those.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I don't get it, you have privacy at home or outside work,
| why when someone is paying you to work for them there is
| an expectation of privacy? You don't see how that is
| extremely counterproductive for capitalism and economic
| activity?
|
| Just don't come to work right? You can have all the
| privacy you want? Or don't visit the business if you are
| the customer.
|
| Please help me understand what the logic and
| justification is to regulate and control security camera
| use within private enterprises (with the obvious
| exception of toilets and changing rooms etc)?
| gr3ml1n wrote:
| Isn't the entire EU essentially a panopticon of cameras?
| jve wrote:
| You have to justify the use of storing (or publishing,
| don't remember) content that includes PII. You must
| register the use of cameras and specify how long and why
| you store those recordings. Which usually states: For
| security purposes. You must include (at least my country)
| a sticker that says particular area under surveillance.
|
| When there is collective photographing at school for
| children, we as parents must consent with a signature...
| which is a little bit annoying.
|
| Having camera at home/yard is no issue.
| dagw wrote:
| _Having camera at home /yard is no issue_
|
| Only if the camera is angled in such a way that it only
| sees your property. A door bell camera that can also see
| the public road in front your house for example is
| technically not allowed, even if most people ignore that
| rule.
| 15155 wrote:
| Panopticon for the State, not for you.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| My doorbell has a camera that records locally.
|
| When the doorbell rings I get a notification on my desktop and
| phone with a relevant image captured a few moments before the
| button was pressed.
|
| Then I can determine if it's something I need to put my pants
| on for.
|
| Mostly it's just fun and easy to add cameras around your house.
| Then you can do stuff like have the LLM count birds it sees or
| ask it "are the dogs in the back yard" etc.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >Then I can determine if it's something I need to put my
| pants on for.
|
| Or if it's Jehovah's Witnesses, something you need to take
| your pants off for.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPS2zupOI_Y
| whatsupdog wrote:
| You can integrate it with home assistant to send notification
| on your phone (or run any other automation) when it detects any
| specified objects.
|
| I have set it to send me notification if any person is detected
| in my front yard, drive way or back yard after I have "armed"
| my alarm at night. I am thinking of also sounding am alarm on
| my home speakers.
|
| Frigate, when configured properly, has a really low false
| positive rate. I have only seen 2-3 false positives in the past
| one year. And if rarely ever misses. So it's something you can
| rely on.
| smallerfish wrote:
| We had a couple of minor break-ins in our neighborhood, and
| subsequently installed 3 very visible cameras along the
| neighborhood road (which is a dead end). No break-ins since.
| Roark66 wrote:
| One good reason for cameras. They promote civil behaviour.
|
| Since I installed a visible security camera above my front door
| I never had couriers throwing packages, they very rarely not
| show up and claim "no one was home" and so on. Also I had a
| neighbour damage my fence every single time he was doing his
| farm work (plowing, harvesting). In addition he would use an
| unfenced portion of my property as a turning place leaving
| deep/huge tire marks and did other silly shit like that despite
| me asking him many times not to do it. Once I installed cameras
| it hasn't happened once.
|
| Then there are other practical reasons, I can review the
| recordings to find out which way my cat went if he is gone for
| a long time, or I can check is he waiting in front of the door
| in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed.
| Also my cameras resolved a mystery how one of my cats got
| injured once (hint - deer really don't like cats).
|
| Finally, let's say there is a huge storm forecast and I'm away.
| I can check remotely everything is fine.
|
| Finally, cameras are very good for insurance purposes. At least
| in my country insurers are known to weasel they way out of
| paying very often. If you have an actual recording that is much
| more difficult for them to do.
|
| The only issue I have with most reasonably priced Cctv cameras
| is that they go towards more megapixels when they should go
| towards more IR sensitivity. Almost every consumer grade camera
| can be defeated at night if a subject is moving quickly. The
| picture will be smeared. So for ID purposes I use lower
| resolution more "professional " cameras.
|
| As for open source, I've been using ZoneMinder with local (and
| on camera) AI for ages.
| defrost wrote:
| Dunno much about the market for consumer grade home mount
| IR/Thermal cameras, I used to use upcycled industrial cameras
| when I worked contracts in the vision domain, recently I'm
| using a rifle scope on a remote controlled mount with a long
| HDMI cable.
|
| Mars MT1000LRF Thermal Riflescope:
|
| * https://old.reddit.com/r/ThermalHunting/comments/1i8wlpp/th
| o...
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBHHCRHnwgw
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| Your argument is like "If we don't do covid testing, we'll have
| no covid cases"
| topspin wrote:
| > Why are people still installing security cameras that are
| monitored by them?
|
| The point of Frigate et. al. is to not have to do the
| monitoring. The false positives of small wildlife, known
| persons/vehicles, etc. do not consume attention, so you forget
| about it until something of actual interest happens.
| jcims wrote:
| People have different dispositions, live in different
| environments with different levels of support from law
| enforcement and face different threats. I live in a remote area
| and am regularly away for extended periods of time. I've spent
| years with and without any security cameras and I'm generally
| more content when I have a few keeping an eye on the place.
| kube-system wrote:
| This! And also, cameras are not just useful to monitor
| criminal threats. If you're away from a property for long
| periods of time, they are also helpful to monitor for weather
| damage, misdelivered packages, animal activity, etc.
| jcims wrote:
| Yes. The vast majority of utility for me has nothing to do
| with criminals lol.
| goopypoop wrote:
| What do you do when you're away and something happens?
|
| What if you're away and the feed dies?
| kube-system wrote:
| I'd assess the urgency of the situation and deal with it
| however I feel appropriate?
| not_that_d wrote:
| There are other use cases, me for example use it to monitor a
| family member that has epilepsy and needs to checked from time
| to time.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > They increase stress level and felt insecurity. They do not
| make you feel secure, say psychological studies. You probably
| think more about burglaries and dead spaces in your setup and
| actively monitor for these in your daily lives, where for 99.8
| % of people this should be a non-topic.
|
| Oh wow, I didn't know I felt that way! I'm glad you were able
| to tell me what I feel.
|
| You are making a lot of assumptions about why people have them.
| 11mariom wrote:
| I would love to ditch things like locking car, home, hiding
| stuff, etc, but unfortunately there are individuals (a way less
| than 0.2% of people) that makes us to...
| jghn wrote:
| I'll take this a step further. I don't understand why so many
| people are installing security cameras at all. And my
| observation has been that there's often an inverse correlation
| between how much someone needs such a camera and how likely
| they are to have one. It's always the suburbanites who are
| talking about their Ring cam footage and freaking out that
| someone's at the door, oh wait, it's just FedEx.
|
| Despite what most people seem to think, crimes like break ins
| in the US are extremely rare. Why do people still feel the need
| to gear up their homes like Fort Knox?
| kccqzy wrote:
| It's not for deterring break-ins. It's just for informational
| purposes like seeing when my package is dropped off. FedEx
| might be pretty good at sending me emails about deliveries
| but plenty of other smaller last-mile couriers don't have any
| way of notifying me. It's also for entertaining purposes like
| seeing a feral cat stretch in my front yard.
| sokka_h2otribe wrote:
| Cats, just for my cats.
| mulmen wrote:
| You mean to make sure they don't get out of the house?
| octo888 wrote:
| The anti social behaviour, fly-tipping and the cutting down of
| my trees by my neighbours stopped once I installed CCTV
| sib wrote:
| >> Why are people still installing security cameras that are
| monitored by them?
|
| Have you priced out security systems with live monitoring by a
| person at a security company? Quite expensive.
| justinwp wrote:
| I live at 7400 ft in Colorado and only lock my doors so the
| bears don't come in. I have cameras on each side of the house
| so I know when not to let my dogs out.
| nirav72 wrote:
| >Why are people still installing security cameras that are
| monitored by them?
|
| Very few people rarely ever actively monitor their home
| security cameras these days. I only look at the recorded
| footage if and only when a predefined event is triggered.
| Usually if a person is detected within a specific area when I'm
| not at home and they shouldn't be there. Such as door leading
| into the house from the backyard. Or if a package is delivered
| and I don't see the package on my doorstep.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Why are people still installing security cameras that are
| monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt
| insecurity.
|
| I am fascinated by this whole thread because I have multiple
| cameras trying to capture hummingbirds, coyotes, and foxes in
| my backyard. We try to ring an alert when they come so we can
| quickly run to the window and be inspired by their grace and
| beauty.
|
| Currently i'm doing this via a very flimsy RPI+webcam setup but
| i'd like something much better. I also have FLIR cams because
| im interested to do this with night vision also.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| In my previous apartment, the landlady had zero sense of
| decency and would let herself in to snoop around.
|
| I use these devices because I can factually know that nobody
| has entered my home while I was gone. It is peace of mind. I
| don't think about burglaries or whatever. I think about how my
| landlord or a property manager or rotating cast of anonymous
| maintenance people have a key and the only reason they don't
| abuse it is because of decency.
| nijave wrote:
| I get notifications when packages are delivered which limits
| the window for porch pirates.
|
| I have a daily news feed of animal activity so I can see what
| the little neighborhood cats, raccoons, and skunks were up to
| last night. I was originally using it to alert me when the
| neighborhood stray was on the back porch so I could come down
| and feed her (without risking other critters finding the food)
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I am installing a doorbell one this week. I got a package
| delivered monday according to the tracker but its not here. It
| would be nice to have had the camera already so I could see if
| someone took the package or if its still potentially not yet
| delivered. Neighbors have gotten packages stolen plenty so it
| is a real risk.
| amelius wrote:
| What is the cheapest way to do something like this in a DIY way
| with FOSS? Assuming you have to buy the computer, and any other
| hardware. Assuming also near real-time processing and reasonably
| high accuracy.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I run Frigate with 5 IP cameras (3 Hikvisions, 2 Amcrests) and 1
| USB camera. I'm using a USB Coral TPU, which does a good enough
| job that Frigate can keep up with an average of only 30% CPU
| usage on an old Dell with 4 core i7-6700.
|
| Frigate's better than anything else I tried, but not perfect. As
| mentioned in another thread, it has some issues with codecs from
| some cameras (playing clips from Amcrests is fine, Hikvisions not
| so much) and therefore you may need to transcode. Also it has no
| built in option for sending your recorded clips offsite;
| theoretically you could mirror its storage directory, but as far
| as I've found it's not organized in a way that you can separate
| just important events.
| boredemployee wrote:
| is it possible to not just recognize people but identify them?
| (with registered pictures beforehand ofc)
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| Yes: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/releases
| Ctrl+F: "Face Recognition"
|
| > Turn on face recognition & upload your first face via Face
| Library - Add Face.
|
| > Train and improve accuracy: New detections appear in Face
| Library - Train with a confidence score-assign each to a new
| or existing person to refine future recognition.
| queuep wrote:
| Neat, I currently use Frigate with Doubletake and
| Compreface for facial recognition. Perhaps I can simplify
| it a bit
| nirav72 wrote:
| I also ran Doublestake and Compreface with Frigate. Found
| out that it didn't really provide any benefits for me.
| The default native person detection in Frigate using the
| TPU is more than adequate. I've seen some interesting
| stuff people have done using a mix of locally hosted LLM
| vision model with Home Assistant and Frigate to do image
| interpretation. Including facial recognition and License
| plate reader. It's something I want to eventually
| explore.
| underdeserver wrote:
| My usual pet peeve -
|
| They use the abbreviation NVR in the first sentence without
| saying what it means.
|
| It means "networked video recorder".
|
| Please don't do that. Not everyone who comes across your site is
| a member of your particular niche.
| tiagod wrote:
| Most stores will just market the devices as NVR or NVR Recorder
| (I know). If you google it, you get your answer immediately.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| Right, but I don't want to open tabs and Google terms right
| after I start reading an article ;) Even as a super technical
| person
| vdfs wrote:
| NVR is to distinguish it from DVR, Digtal Video Recorder
| (ironically it's not really digital, more like analog) It's
| much cheaper than NVR, because the camras are simple and
| diffrere the encoding to the DVR unit. And there XVR with
| can combine both Network and Digital cameras
| hopelite wrote:
| You are missing the point. It has been considered general
| English language competency that you always expand the first
| instance of any abbreviation that is not absolutely obvious
| in context, e.g., USA, "e.g.", or CIA, unless you happen to
| be writing about the Culinary Institute of America in most
| contexts outside of the culinary context.
|
| It is a rather annoying myopic perspective I most often run
| across in tech, where technical people for whatever reason
| are so fixated on their little corner that they are either
| unaware or simply indifferent to the fact that there are
| others in the world, and that if they want to spread their
| work and impact, they need to make things approachable and
| lower barriers to entry.
|
| It Is why the rule of general language proficiency exists in
| English especially because of all the abbreviations, to
| facilitate information and knowledge sharing.
|
| Let's all improve by going through whatever our project is
| and make sure that at least in the context, abbreviations are
| easily understood by expanding them, e.g., your
| introduction/overview page and documentation should always
| expand most first instance abbreviations, including in
| separate, high level segments (e.g., if you have different
| first contact pages or objects) unless they are globally
| known to society.
|
| It's really not any different than any other "sales" tactic;
| you will not be successful selling something if you do not
| first describe what it does in a one-liner. Ask yourself,
| "who is the person I want/need to come to this thing and
| should I assume they would know what this all means?"
| tiagod wrote:
| What I'm arguing is that in the context of CCTV (Closed-
| circuit television) systems, NVR is a universal term.
|
| I would also argue that the expansion of "e.g." is not
| "absolutely obvious". I know what it means ("for example"),
| but I had to google it to know it's an abbreviation of
| "exempli gratia", and I don't speak Latin, so I don't even
| know exactly what that means without reading further.
|
| In the same way, you can also quickly understand from the
| page what an NVR is without knowing the exact expansion.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I have no real conclusion here, but sort of land on the
| side of "Why wouldn't you expand it?"
|
| The abbreviation of _e.g._ isn 't a good example. It is
| hundreds of years old and taught in schools. It is
| essentially a feature of the language (or at least of
| writing the language) and can hardly be compared to the
| far more recent initialism NVR. It is ubiquitous and all
| native English speakers should know it and all non-native
| English speakers should learn it.
|
| VCR is an example that is almost always referred to
| solely as its initialism. However, this became a
| completely ubiquitous term. Early advertisements didn't
| say "VCR", they said things like "video recorder"[0].
| Once it was ubiquitous non-specialists knew what a VCR
| was even if they didn't understand the initialism and
| they were marketed just as "VCR". One could make the case
| that "VCR" stopped being a pure initialism and become
| more of a word. (VHS on the other hand... not expanded in
| that video.)
|
| Is NVR ubiquitous enough? BestBuy sells them without
| expanding the initialism (in the examples I checked), so
| maybe. However, I bet if you sampled people, the majority
| wouldn't be able to tell you. And BestBuy selling them
| this way may have more to do with limited 'item title'
| space.
|
| It might be the case that it is well-enough known among
| people who 'need to know' like security folks. I'd argue
| that's probably not meaningful if BestBuy is retailing
| them to the public.
|
| Maybe a better example is something like an air-
| admittance valve (AAV). Most people have never heard of
| it, but all plumbers have heard of it. In context, anyone
| can probably figure out what it does. And yet Oatey
| "correctly" (according to style rules) identifies the
| name and puts the initialism in parentheses[1].
|
| So on the one hand, it may be ubiquitous enough that it
| doesn't matter (and is becoming more of a word). On the
| other hand, there's evidence here that it does matter
| because it isn't ubiquitous enough for people to be
| comfortable not knowing what the acronym means.
|
| What I can't see is the downside of writing "network
| video recorder (NVR)" on the first instance of is use at
| least on the landing page. Everyone has to learn what it
| means somewhere and it seems like a missed marketing
| opportunity for it to not be through your product's
| landing page. It may also reduce friction or aid in SEO.
| (YMMV, but I get quite different results searching for
| "network video recorder" and "NVR".)
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ9nkyo01HQ [1] -
| https://www.oatey.com/products/air-admittance-valves-aav
| tiagod wrote:
| You're defending expanding these terms (which I agree to
| some point), but then writing 'e.g.', 'YMMV' and 'SEO'
| which you could have expanded or replaced by more obvious
| constructions like 'for example', 'your mileage may vary'
| and 'search engine optimization'.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I'm not trying to sell anything, I'm keeping my audience
| in mind, and I'm writing to an internet forum, not
| professionally.
| some_random wrote:
| NVR is absolutely obvious in the context of Frigate, an AI
| object detector for surveillance cameras.
| disruptiveink wrote:
| Usually I would agree with you, but this is an incredibly
| common initialism, used by not just people in the industry, but
| also by consumers. Sure, it may not be as widespread as VHS
| (global) or API (tech-adjacent), but anyone who is in the
| market for this software already knows what NVR means.
|
| Most people would know the term from either being quoted or
| looking up CCTV solutions, all of which, unless they're fully
| "cloud-based", come with a component that is called the NVR.
| You wouldn't even consider this if you weren't aware of the
| concept. If NVR means nothing to you, Network Video Recorder
| doesn't mean anything to you either. This is meant to be a
| replacement for closed and inflexible hardware boxes that are
| sold together with security cameras, and the name of those
| boxes are "NVRs".
| triceratops wrote:
| As a consumer I disagree. Never heard of "NVR" but I can suss
| out what "network video recorder" means from context.
| vdfs wrote:
| NVR is to distinguish it from DVR, Digtal Video Recorder
| (ironically it's not really digital, more like analog) It's
| much cheaper than NVR, because the camras are simple and
| diffrere the encoding to the DVR unit. And there XVR wich
| can combine both Network and Digital cameras
| sib wrote:
| Which is odd because the first time I heard the term DVR
| was in the late 1990's, referring to the box that was
| used to record TV signals digitally for playback and/or
| ad-skipping. The term distinguished it from things such
| as VCRs, which recorded in analog, on tape. Those DVRs
| were, in fact, digital.
| LocalH wrote:
| If the recorder uses digital video as its storage, it's a
| real DVR, even if the video input is that weird HD
| variant of NTSC that's everywhere in security cameras
| underdeserver wrote:
| > Most people would know the term from either being quoted or
| looking up CCTV solutions
|
| I'm not sure why you're assuming most people ever requested a
| quote or looked up CCTV solutions. I sure haven't.
| pc86 wrote:
| But the site is for software managing... CCTV solutions.
|
| I didn't know what NVR meant either but it seems reasonable
| for Frigate to assume 90% of the people coming across their
| site would be given the context.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's an incredibly weak argument.
|
| Now justify intentionally confusing 10% of the audience
| because you don't want to put two dozen more characters
| on the web page to define an acronym.
|
| How much contempt do you have to have for your potential
| users to actively want to confuse 10% of them, when it's
| so easy not to?
|
| Do you really intend to reduce your user base by 10%
| because you don't want to educate your potential users
| with a couple dozen letters defining your terms?
|
| Do you consider 10% of the audience too stupid and
| undeserving to use the software, and want to preemptively
| gatekeep and drive them away before they've even tried
| it?
|
| Most rational people would bend over backwards to reach
| 1% more of their potential audience, but you want to
| alienate 10%? What do you have against them?
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Please consider that we're not all English-speaking, and that
| such terms may be unknown to people who aren't from your
| culture, even if we do understand your language. CCTV could
| mean "China Central TeleVision" for instance ;-)
| some_random wrote:
| In the context of surveillance cameras it is perfectly
| clear what CCTV stands for, and if it is an unknown to
| someone because they are not familiar with the english
| language it is also perfectly reasonable to just force them
| to look it up like they would any other english word they
| are unfamiliar with.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Acronyms are not the same as the English language as they
| are not words by themselves but compressions. "Closed-
| circuit television" is self-evident to a reader; CCTV
| isn't. And "in the context", yes, but readers are not
| necessarily experts in their fields. This is why many
| news publications usually expand acronyms.
| some_random wrote:
| So to be clear, I think that it would make sense for
| Frigate to define NVR the first time they use it on their
| site. However, this isn't a news publication and I really
| don't think it's unreasonable to expect any serious
| visitor to the Frigate site to be expert enough to know
| what an NVR is.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You haven't identified any upside to NOT defining terms,
| and you're scoffing at the actual downside, willing to
| confuse people who don't know the terms.
|
| I just can't get my head around what motivates your anti-
| acronym-definition ideology.
|
| How is the world a better place if you don't define
| acronyms?
|
| Does defining acronyms annoy you, or cost you your
| dignity, or make you feel less special for knowing
| something other people don't? Why are you so anti-
| education, anti-accessibility, anti-inclusivity? Are
| those inherently bad things in your opinion?
|
| Is accessibility and user friendliness too "woke" for you
| to tolerate, a manifestation of DEI that must be stamped
| out at all costs, because empathy for users is a weakness
| that's a menace to society and you very manhood?
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| As a video professional, with many devices for recording
| video both at baseband and via ip, and responsible for
| delivering audio and video streams via networks to tens of
| millions of people, I had no idea what "NVR" meant.
| infecto wrote:
| I don't believe video professional equates to security
| professional. Would not expect someone who is a video
| professional to know NVR but at the same time if you don't
| know what an NVR is I would not expect someone to be using
| this software. The entry point into this space is an NVR.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| "incredibly common initialism, used by not just people in
| the industry, but also by consumers"
|
| Consumers are a wide range of people. 99 percent who have
| never heard
|
| NVR is a niche term for a tiny number of people in a tiny
| industry.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| He's just a gatekeeper who doesn't want 99% of people
| invading his private clique.
|
| I've never heard of the term "NVR" until today either.
|
| And I too professionally develop live video streaming and
| analysis pipelines, with networked cameras, computer
| vision object recognition and pose detection, action and
| task identification, database analytics and
| visualizations, etc.
|
| And we simply call cameras "cameras", install lots of
| them at our customers' sites, and nobody gets confused
| about what they are.
|
| We don't need or use a special acronym for cameras. And
| we're not willing to confuse 10% of our customers on our
| home page by assuming they are trained professionals in
| some particular specialized industry:
|
| https://leela.ai
|
| And I don't think "NVR" is a particularly useful or clear
| distinction, since it's ambiguous about whether there's
| an actual camera involved, or if it's just a TiVo digital
| video recorder.
|
| I also run Home Assistant at home, monitoring several
| cameras, and Home Assistant's home page and user
| interface don't use the term "NVR". They just call them
| "cameras" too, without confusing anyone. The "Category"
| menu of their integrations page has a "Camera" category,
| but no "NVR" category. Even their generic "Camera"
| integration doesn't mention "NVR". Case closed.
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations?cat=camera
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/camera/
|
| What's the big deal that you need to call cameras by an
| acronym that doesn't even mention that they're cameras?
| No duh, of course the cameras are on a network, and of
| course they record, why belabor it with an niche acronym,
| then refuse to spell out what the letters mean?
|
| For the same reason, I don't call databases "NDRs" and
| then refuse to spell out that I mean "Network Data
| Recorders". They're just "databases", no need for
| confusing acronyms.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I don't believe video professional equates to security
| professional._
|
| Just stop. You're wrong, you're defending an indefensible
| point, and even if you "win," there's no upside for you.
|
| Signed, someone else who's interested in this field and
| in Frigate in particular, and who had no idea what "NVR"
| stood for.
| infecto wrote:
| Disagree. I would expect 90% or more of the folks coming to
| Frigate would know what an NVR is. Would be nice to define all
| things definitely but NVR seems table stakes knowledge to even
| consider using Frigate.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 100% of people coming to frigate can read "networked video
| recorder".
| infecto wrote:
| So what? Like I said it does not hurt to define but at the
| same time if you don't know what NVR stands for, Frigate is
| not for you. It's like reading an equity research paper and
| complaining EPS is not defined. Some things just don't need
| to be defined and if you don't know, you most likely are
| not the target audience.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| What is your motivation and justification for alienating
| 10% of your users? You're the one claiming that 90% of
| users know the term, as if that was an argument FOR
| leaving out the definition. But that means 10% do NOT
| understand the definition. So why do you have so much
| contempt for 10% of the potential users, that you want to
| actively confuse them by not defining terms? What is the
| UPSIDE of driving 10% of the potential users away? Does
| it make you happy to exclude 10% of people not in your
| clique for some bizarre reason, so it's worth cutting off
| your nose to spite your face?
| infecto wrote:
| You've really taken a mild disagreement and spun it into
| some moral crusade against user inclusivity. No one is
| "alienating" users or acting out of "contempt"... I made
| a simple point that, for a niche technical project like
| Frigate, it's reasonable to assume some baseline domain
| knowledge.
|
| If someone doesn't know what an NVR is, they're likely
| not ready to deploy a self-hosted AI-powered video
| surveillance system. That's not exclusionary and it's
| just reality. Let's not pretend a missing acronym
| definition is the same as slamming a door in someone's
| face.
|
| I am sorry expressing an opinion offended you.
| joevandyk wrote:
| I'm exactly the target market for this, I've been looking at
| using Frigate for the past month, and I've done a ton of
| research.
|
| I did not know what "NVR" meant prior to reading the OP.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Why would you NOT want them to define NVR on their web page?
| What purpose does that serve, how does leaving out
| definitions tangibly make the web site better?
|
| Is your internet connection so slow that a couple dozen more
| characters on a web page would take too long to download, and
| that destroys your user experience?
| infecto wrote:
| Just to be clear, my comment was in response to someone
| saying Frigate should define NVR. I'm not against clarity,
| but for a tool like this, it's fair to assume users know
| the basics. No need to get weirdly condescending about a
| simple disagreement.
| some_random wrote:
| Assuming visitors know what NVR stands for seems like a
| perfectly reasonable assumption, but even if they don't I think
| there's enough context for someone to still understand what
| Frigate is.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| The new style of "Open source;" I wonder what kind of fun secrets
| are hidden in the model and Coral Accelerator.
|
| Unfortunately, the USB Accelerator is very hard to buy even at 3x
| retail.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| You dont necessarily need the Coral device. I'm running frigate
| on an Intel N200 CPU with one camera, it uses OpenVINO for GPU
| accelerated detection, and consumes about 10% CPU.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Side note. I'm surprised we're not doing more with LLMs as far as
| image and video processing. We now have some level of imaging
| understanding in a box (and some common sense). Seems like there
| would be millions of possibilities.
|
| Is manufacturing using it for anything? More security
| applications?
| not_that_d wrote:
| The title is misleading, you get that "full local" just with the
| default install and model. And the default model sucks, for
| example this is a "person alert": https://imgur.com/a/uDCCTjr,
| this is just funny https://imgur.com/a/pP4ZvQI
|
| I have a love/hate relation with Frigate, I use it since 2 years
| but since the business model of the developer is provide a "good
| model" using a custom one is not possible (at least not in a easy
| ways AFAIK).
|
| I use my cameras to track a family member with a medical
| condition, this is why I do not feel confortable uploading those
| image to the "Frigate+" service to eventually get better
| training.
| queuep wrote:
| Frigate, Doubletake + Compreface is 100% local
| swores wrote:
| Person you're replying to mentioned Frigate+ which is the
| paid subscription option offering the ability to upload
| images to their servers in order to further train the models
| to get better accuracy, so no longer 100% local.
|
| Maybe you're suggesting that using two additional tools in
| combination with the free version of Frigate brings its
| quality up on par with that of an extra-trained Frigate+? If
| that's so it would be great if you could say that and
| elaborate how so / why, rather than just dropping in some new
| tool names and no explanation as to how/if they address GP's
| points. (Thanks in advance if you do come back and explain.)
|
| Edit: I just looked into Doubletake + Compreface, seems
| they're both facial recognition tools, so using them wouldn't
| overcome the problem GP commenter reported that Frigate
| without Frigate+'s additional training doesn't do a good
| enough job of general object tagging for them?
| swores wrote:
| I'm probably being dense here, but could you please explain
| your first image link? Assuming you didn't accidentally link
| the wrong image, I'm struggling to see how even a not-very-good
| model would think that's a person, and it doesn't look like a
| security camera screenshot like your second image does.
| not_that_d wrote:
| Is not the wrong image. I got a notification (thru Home
| Assistant) because Frigate detected that group of toy horses
| as a person. I tried to find the image where the box is
| visible but only found that preview.
|
| Edit: I found a better place to make an screenshot
| https://imgur.com/a/5qpDWia There you can see the event
| marked as "Person"
| xyst wrote:
| I don't get the appeal or desire of a 24/7/365 perimeter camera
| system on a _personal_ home. Society has truly gone downhill if
| individual homeowners need surveillance tech to appease their own
| fears in a _suburb_.
|
| At most, I would really only need a front door video camera that
| acts as a door bell. One of the things I miss most about my older
| apartment was the keyless entry and ability to virtually answer
| the door.
| nsteel wrote:
| How far out of a major city would I need to live for my fears
| to become rational and my lust for surveillance to be
| justified, in your opinion? Beyond the wall?
| 93po wrote:
| Is this capable of doing something, like, telling if someone is
| standing in a bathroom? Is it capable of determining if they're
| specifically in the shower? It sounds like this is based on weird
| snooping goals but it's just the example that comes to mind in
| terms of its ability to tag whats happening in video/image.
| mysteria wrote:
| This is worth mentioning but a GPU or TPU is not required if you
| have a small number of cameras and set up your detection zones
| right. I use a low resolution/framerate MJPEG substream for
| detection to reduce the amount of decoder effort and use h264
| only for recording and viewing. Openvino is the recommended
| choice for CPU recognition and it's much faster than the default
| Tensorflow detector.
|
| It only uses around 20% CPU on a 6 core VM (running on a Ivy
| Bridge Xeon) with two cameras.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Related to this, I use this script to setup a live stream of my
| cameras on a debian system connected to a little monitor
|
| https://gist.github.com/neontuna/d1ba0c771aa89c42910f21c0aae...
|
| I didn't like having to fire up some NVR software just to get the
| camera live stream, and you're locked into whatever options that
| software might have. With ffmpeg you can do some cool stuff with
| filters.
| 404human wrote:
| Two years with Frigate and zero regrets--local is the way to go!
| nirav72 wrote:
| Frigate has been great for me. Been using it for couple of years
| in a Unraid server with 8 cameras connected. Mix of Eufy and Tapo
| cameras. Only downside is that it doesn't have a IOS/Android
| application yet. So for now, I just use the frigate web UI as PWA
| on IOS. Then access it on my local network via VPN once I receive
| a notification.
| vanillax wrote:
| Echoing what most users have said, running frigate last 4 years.
| Early adopter. Cool thing is you can technically run webrtc from
| nest webcams via HA into Frigate. I run frigate without Home
| Assistant, but recently added home assistant back so I can pipe
| webRTC thru HA plugin to frigate. Now I dont need to pay for nest
| aware.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| What is the best outdoor wifi camera (ideally with a solar panel,
| so no wires) that works with Frigate. I see Tapo and Eufy
| mentioned in the comments, but do folks here have favorites?
|
| I'm looking for outdoor + wireless, primarily for wildlife
| watching.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| This is cool and it amazes me how the "big" home security
| companies don't have this. My Ring cameras false detect all the
| time. The front will detect the flag as a person when it blows in
| the wind. The rear gets triggered by the pool robot skimmer. As
| much as I'd love to try this, I don't have the time. It would be
| great though if it was built into something I could buy.
| Rhubarrbb wrote:
| Frigate has been an overweight nightmare for me to work with.
| Trying to detect wildlife that are not in their classification
| models is basically impossible. I've been better off using motion
| / motioneye for a lightweight and practical approach
| noefingway wrote:
| yeah - i've been using it for several years. it's got some
| issues: fails to detect cars and trucks at night (apparently it
| doesn't know what to do with the moving headlights); also
| frequently fails to detect me walking past the camera with my 4
| small dogs on our morning walk; confuses farm equipment for
| cars and continues to record even when the object is
| stationary. still it's better than most of the other software
| i've tried.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| +1 to using Frigate. I've had it running on my home server for a
| couple of years and it has served us very well. Detect is running
| on an old GTX 960 I had laying around, and it works a charm
| (though I'll probably run out of legroom once I bring up more
| cameras).
|
| One of the big advantages is that I can pick and choose which
| camera I use, and then segment it off on it's own firewalled VLAN
| so it's only talking to my server applications. That lets me know
| that its not phoning home, and I can run PoE cameras that are
| immune to wifi jammers.
|
| The idea that the surroundings of my house aren't being beamed
| straight into an Amazon datacenter somewhere is particularly
| satisfying.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Go long on Furry Costumes!
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