Detection & AI
Detection is how camera.ui understands what's in your video: movement, people and vehicles, faces, license plates, and sounds. It runs on your own hardware, and the results become events you can browse, get notified about, and search.
How detection works
Detection is layered, so it stays efficient:
- Motion runs continuously and cheaply. It just notices that something changed.
- When motion fires, the heavier AI wakes up. It runs object detection (people, vehicles, animals, packages), then looks closer at what it found: faces on the people it sees, license plates on the vehicles, and a semantic fingerprint for search. Audio is analysed alongside.
This "cascade" means the demanding AI only runs when there's something to look at, and each step only runs on the objects it applies to, which keeps CPU and GPU use low.
What you can detect
- Motion — movement in the frame.
- Objects — people, vehicles, animals, and packages.
- Faces — recognise known people and group unknown ones.
- License plates — read plate numbers.
- Audio — sounds like glass breaking, alarms, or a dog barking.
- Semantic search — find moments by describing them in words.
- AI descriptions — a written summary of what happened.
Plugins do the work
Detection is provided by plugins you enable per camera: a motion engine and an AI backend that matches your hardware. You choose and tune them in a camera's settings. See Set up sensors for how to enable them.
Each detection becomes part of an event. See Events & detections for how those are structured, and Recording (NVR) for browsing them.