Frigate - Detecting small objects - birds, cats etc

1

Hi everyone,
I have Frigate setup running the latest version. I have setup detection for person, dog, cat and bird. I am reliably getting notifications about person but I am unable to get and. bird or cat notifications. I have seen birds in the garden and I can see via camera feed but frigate is not detecting this. I presume this is the object being too small for frigate to detect as my camera is mounted high up. How can I ask the Frigate to detect these small objects? I am using a a substream with 720p for detection purpose. Would using the mainstream help? I am aware that this will take up more resources.

I would appreciate any help. My use case is the shoo the birds away with an automation as they feed on my vegetables in the garden.

Thank you

2
  1. Using a higher resolution would help and of course use more resources. If you are on the latest version you could also use the main stream and use the detect -> width / height settings to resize to a different resolution using your GPU to do most the work.
  2. You also may be okay with your current resolution and just need to make motion detection more sensitive.
3

Hi
Thanks for your reply.
I am using width/height in the config to adjust the detect area but I am not sure if I am doing it right. Do we have to give a small area for the smaller object to be detected reliably? My config is currenlty as below:

detect:
width: 1080
height: 720
fps: 5
objects:
track:
- person
- cat
- bird
- dog
filters:
bird:
min_area: 100
max_area: 5000
min_ratio: 0.5
max_ratio: 2.0
min_score: 0.5
threshold: 0.5

I have also attached 2 snapshots with a bird detected (to my surprise today, one even before I changed the resolution) As you can see they are quite small area. What does this mean? Do I have to make the area even smaller in the config?

snapshot-1682691851.72272-x7c9lv
snapshot-1682691851.72272-x7c9lv960×576 123 KB

snapshot-1682697801.915628-v0m7v6
snapshot-1682697801.915628-v0m7v61080×720 237 KB

4

I would not recommend setting these. These are only there to limit the detection. If you are having issues detecting birds you should remove all filters until you get a setup that detects the birds you want.

1 Like
5

I did not have any filters but nothing was detecting. Hence I was playing around with the settings after reading through frigate documents. Default threshold is .7 so I reduced to detect something. Likewise the area default is much higher, so I reduced this. I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing here by reducing the area. As you can see a bird is detected with a bounding box of only 475 pixels. Also once my BBQ was detected as a bird and also a person was also detected as a bird. Hence the reason for setting these. Basically, asking frigate to only detect small objects as birds and ignore large ones. At least that’s what I understand and I could be completely wrong here.

6

Yeah these details weren’t included before so it wasn’t clear why they were being set, but that makes sense.

7

I need frigate to detect if a cat has a bird or chipmunk in its mouth before entering the cat door and to lock if true lol. My cats are bringing their kills back with them.

8 
    detect:
      width: 1270 # <- optional, by default Frigate tries to automatically detect resolution
      height: 720 # <- optional, by default Frigate tries to automatically detect resolution
      fps: 5
      stationary:
        interval: 20
        threshold: 50

    # object track ????
    objects:
      track:
        - person
        - dog
        - cat
        - bird
      filters:
        person:
          min_area: 5000
          min_score: 0.5
          threshold: 0.6
        dog:
          #min_area: 4000
          #min_score: 0.5
          #threshold: 0.6
          min_area: 5000
          min_score: 0.6 # Orig 0.5
          threshold: 0.85 # Orig 0.6
        cat:
          min_area: 5000
          min_score: 0.6 # Orig 0.5
          threshold: 0.85 # Orig 0.6
        bird:
          min_area: 100
          max_area: 5000
          min_ratio: 0.5
          max_ratio: 2.0
          min_score: 0.5
          threshold: 0.5

With the above parameters it detected a rock of about 12" square as a bird!

How would you guess, or measure the min_area or max_area pixels of a bird that appears in Frigate > Settings > Debug? My questions is, how would fix the values when a bird is detected and it’s a false detection, how would you measure the value of increase or decrease for min_area and, or max area?

Here is a picture for your reference:
Screenshot 2024-10-11 112817

9

the number to the right of the % is the area. Though a bird could easily be that area or close to it depending on how close it is to the camera