Events & detections

When detection fires, camera.ui groups what it finds into an event. Knowing the pieces helps when you browse recordings, set up notifications, or search.

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

Two things can start or shape an event:

• 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.

The difference matters for filtering and notifications: you can 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. 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, most Reolink AI and ONVIF cameras, gives nothing to frame. The moving part of the picture is framed instead. That is less precise than a real box, so an object assist plugin is the better answer if you want those cameras placed properly.

Stationary objects

A car parked in the driveway or a bin left in view would otherwise be detected again every time something moves. Ignore stationary objects is on by default in a camera's Settings → Detection: once an object has held still for a while, camera.ui stops counting it as a detection, and it stays ignored across later events. You still see its box in the live view. It counts again once it moves off the spot, or if the camera pans or tilts.

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.