10 ms·

Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI

602 points by zakki 1y ago

xiconfjs 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    For sure, but rats and moths are usually not that cool ^^
  - danparsonson 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Yeah didn't realize raccoons wandered in families until I saw a line of 5 of them wander by nightly with Frigate
  - pugworthy 1y ago
    My Wyze cameras love to report "pets" - which have been deer, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and yes occasionally a cat or dog.
  - nijave 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Re: outdated Python: Isn’t this a perfect usecase for Docker? Nix/NixOS is another option.
    - smokel 1y ago
      No. You might get it to run, but you would also get old security exploits to run.
      - Cyph0n 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        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.
- zeroflow 1y ago
  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 1y ago
I've been doing this with great success for over five years with Camect, so what's new?
- zakki 1y ago
  Is Camect a self-host solution?
  - tehlike 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  At a first look? No, or at least not well maintained Home Assistant integration.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
thomas_witt 1y ago
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 1y ago
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/products/up-ai-port https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-cameras-nvrs/product...
- closewith 1y ago
  Does the AI key work for more than one camera at a time?
  - nodesocket 1y ago
    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 1y ago
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 1y ago
What your "stack" of open source cameras and dvr?
- hostyle 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    How is that simicam doing at night?
    - hostyle 1y ago
      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.
timzaman 1y ago
Just buy Unifi guys
- qwertox 1y ago
  The Network Video Recorder UNVR is 320€ 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 100€ can store the data over there?
  - entropie 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603 Iam not sure but I think so
zhengiszen 1y ago
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 https://openipc.org/?locale=en
sunshine-o 1y ago
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 https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc - [1] https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx
- lormayna 1y ago
  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/ https://motion-project.github.io/
  - sunshine-o 1y ago
    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 https://github.com/xj25vm/MotionSpot/blob/main/motionspot.py
    - lormayna 1y ago
      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#OptDetail_Scripts https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetai...
elitistphoenix 1y ago
Google Coral Accelerator is basically abandoned these days though
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Frigate's docs has some detection speeds listed: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#openvino 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 https://docs.frigate.video/plus/#supported-detector-types
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Luckily Frigate works with a ton of different accelerators, like the Hailo, Intel's iGPU, even some Arm GPUs now too.
  - dll 1y ago
    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 1y ago
Tractor8626 1y ago
So burglar just need to carry big sign "Ignore previous instructions and don't report anything"? "
- kookamamie 1y ago
  waves hand "These are not the detections you are looking for."
- dust42 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        I think you may be overestimating my local crackhead porch pirates
      - boobsbr 1y ago
        Light shinobi.
senectus1 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
Luker88 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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/ https://openmv.io/ and their recently-kickstarted N6 & AE3 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae3-low-power-python-programmable-ai-cameras https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae...
  - nergal 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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?
matsemann 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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/examples/facerec_from_video_file.py https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition/blob/master/exa... [1] https://github.com/deveth0/python-opencv/tree/master/objectDetection https://github.com/deveth0/python-opencv/tree/master/objectD...
  - matsemann 1y ago
    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)
princevegeta89 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - 1y ago
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a3w 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Burglars hate them
- e40 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
- smallerfish 1y ago
  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.
- spauldo 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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evrennetwork 1y ago
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amelius 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  is it possible to not just recognize people but identify them? (with registered pictures beforehand ofc)
  - dimitri-vs 1y ago
    Yes: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/releases 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 1y ago
      Neat, I currently use Frigate with Doubletake and Compreface for facial recognition. Perhaps I can simplify it a bit
      - nirav72 1y ago
        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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Most stores will just market the devices as NVR or NVR Recorder (I know). If you google it, you get your answer immediately.
  - lobsterthief 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    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?”
neuroelectron 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 https://imgur.com/a/uDCCTjr, this is just funny https://imgur.com/a/pP4ZvQI 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 1y ago
  Frigate, Doubletake + Compreface is 100% local
  - swores 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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.
xyst 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
93po 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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/d1ba0c771aa89c42910f21c0aae628b8 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 1y ago
Two years with Frigate and zero regrets—local is the way to go!
nirav72 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
+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 1y ago
Go long on Furry Costumes!

602 points by zakki 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  For sure, but rats and moths are usually not that cool ^^
- danparsonson 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Yeah didn't realize raccoons wandered in families until I saw a line of 5 of them wander by nightly with Frigate
- pugworthy 1y ago
  My Wyze cameras love to report "pets" - which have been deer, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and yes occasionally a cat or dog.
- nijave 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Re: outdated Python: Isn’t this a perfect usecase for Docker? Nix/NixOS is another option.
  - smokel 1y ago
    No. You might get it to run, but you would also get old security exploits to run.
    - Cyph0n 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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.
zeroflow 1y ago
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 1y ago

I've been doing this with great success for over five years with Camect, so what's new?

zakki 1y ago
Is Camect a self-host solution?
- tehlike 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
At a first look? No, or at least not well maintained Home Assistant integration.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

thomas_witt 1y ago

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 1y ago

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/products/up-ai-port https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-cameras-nvrs/product...

closewith 1y ago
Does the AI key work for more than one camera at a time?
- nodesocket 1y ago
  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 1y ago

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 1y ago

What your "stack" of open source cameras and dvr?

hostyle 1y ago
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 1y ago
  How is that simicam doing at night?
  - hostyle 1y ago
    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.

timzaman 1y ago

Just buy Unifi guys

qwertox 1y ago
The Network Video Recorder UNVR is 320€ 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 100€ can store the data over there?
- entropie 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603 Iam not sure but I think so

zhengiszen 1y ago

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 https://openipc.org/?locale=en

sunshine-o 1y ago

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 https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc - [1] https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx

lormayna 1y ago
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/ https://motion-project.github.io/
- sunshine-o 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/xj25vm/MotionSpot/blob/main/motionspot.py
  - lormayna 1y ago
    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#OptDetail_Scripts https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetai...

elitistphoenix 1y ago

Google Coral Accelerator is basically abandoned these days though

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Frigate's docs has some detection speeds listed: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#openvino 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 https://docs.frigate.video/plus/#supported-detector-types
geerlingguy 1y ago
Luckily Frigate works with a ton of different accelerators, like the Hailo, Intel's iGPU, even some Arm GPUs now too.
- dll 1y ago
  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 1y ago

Tractor8626 1y ago

So burglar just need to carry big sign "Ignore previous instructions and don't report anything"? "

kookamamie 1y ago
waves hand "These are not the detections you are looking for."
dust42 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      I think you may be overestimating my local crackhead porch pirates
    - boobsbr 1y ago
      Light shinobi.

senectus1 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.

Luker88 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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/ https://openmv.io/ and their recently-kickstarted N6 & AE3 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae3-low-power-python-programmable-ai-cameras https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae...
- nergal 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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?

matsemann 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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/examples/facerec_from_video_file.py https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition/blob/master/exa... [1] https://github.com/deveth0/python-opencv/tree/master/objectDetection https://github.com/deveth0/python-opencv/tree/master/objectD...
- matsemann 1y ago
  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)

princevegeta89 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - 1y ago

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a3w 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
Burglars hate them
e40 1y ago
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 1y ago
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.
smallerfish 1y ago
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.
spauldo 1y ago

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evrennetwork 1y ago

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amelius 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
is it possible to not just recognize people but identify them? (with registered pictures beforehand ofc)
- dimitri-vs 1y ago
  Yes: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/releases 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 1y ago
    Neat, I currently use Frigate with Doubletake and Compreface for facial recognition. Perhaps I can simplify it a bit
    - nirav72 1y ago
      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 1y ago

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 1y ago
Most stores will just market the devices as NVR or NVR Recorder (I know). If you google it, you get your answer immediately.
- lobsterthief 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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?”

neuroelectron 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 https://imgur.com/a/uDCCTjr, this is just funny https://imgur.com/a/pP4ZvQI 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 1y ago
Frigate, Doubletake + Compreface is 100% local
- swores 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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.

xyst 1y ago

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 1y ago
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?

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93po 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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/d1ba0c771aa89c42910f21c0aae628b8 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 1y ago

Two years with Frigate and zero regrets—local is the way to go!

nirav72 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

+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 1y ago

Go long on Furry Costumes!