Events & detections

When detection fires, camera.ui groups what it finds into an event.

The pieces

• Event. Everything that happens during one continuous burst of activity at a camera. An event has a start and an end, and can update as it goes.
• Segment. A stretch of an event where the AI kept seeing objects, with its own thumbnail. Objects leaving and coming back start a new segment, and an event where the AI never sees an object, like a doorbell press with nobody in view, has none.
• Detection. Something the AI found in a segment, such as a person or a vehicle, with a confidence score.
• Attribute. Extra detail on a detection, such as a recognized face, a license plate, or a semantic (CLIP) embedding used for search.

Triggers vs detections

• A trigger is a signal that something happened: motion, a doorbell, a contact sensor, an alarm sound. A trigger can start an event on its own.
• A detection is what the AI actually recognized in the video, like an object, a face, or a plate.

You can filter and alert on a doorbell press (a trigger) or only when a person is seen (a detection).

The picture an event carries

Every card, push and AI description shows one picture for the moment, and camera.ui picks the frame and the crop for it. It frames the subject, so a person arrives as a whole person, not as a close-up of a shoulder. Whatever moves in the picture at the same time is framed with it, whatever stands still is not. When a face is recognized later in the same event, the "Unknown" crop is dropped rather than kept alongside the name.

A camera that reports detections without saying where in the frame they were, many Reolink and ONVIF cameras, gives nothing to frame. The moving part of the picture is framed instead, which is less precise. An object assist plugin gives those cameras real boxes.

Stationary objects

Ignore stationary objects is on by default in a camera's Settings → Detection: once an object (a parked car, a bin) has held still for a while, camera.ui stops counting it as a detection, across later events too. Its box still shows in the live view. It counts again once it moves off the spot, or if the camera pans or tilts.

The detection trace

Every event keeps a record of what the detector actually saw. The dots menu on a card in Recordings, and the trace icon in the event dialog, opens it. Opened from a card it starts at the moment the card shows, from the camera view at the moment on screen. For an event that ran for hours, type a clock time above the frame strip to jump there; Earlier frames loads what came before.

It steps through the event frame by frame with pictures from the recording, keeping only a few frames around each activity, and shows per frame the objects and the tracks they belong to, the motion boxes, the raw detections from 25 % confidence up, the camera's own detection reports, and the zones as they stood at the time. Where something was seen but did not become an event, the trace names the reason: under the confidence threshold, inside a privacy zone, outside the object zones, a label the zone does not accept, or a track too young to be confirmed. Faces and plates dropped by the camera's settings show dashed, with the setting they missed. When a less certain sighting kept a track going, the track shows that frame's confidence next to the last certain one. Each face read shows whom it matched, or who came closest when nobody did (both people when two came about equally close), and how many reads agree on the name. Every track carries its state, from tentative through active, stationary and lost to departed.

Frames zoom like the live view (wheel, pinch, double tap). An event without a recording shows its detection data without frames. If the browser cannot decode the main stream, the pictures come from the smaller one and are matched by time instead of exactly.

Download bundle packs the whole trace into one file for a bug report.

Where events show up

Events drive the rest of camera.ui:

• Recordings — browse and filter past events.
• Notifications — get alerted about the ones that matter.
• Semantic search — find events by describing them.