Generic IP Camera and scan_interval

Configuration
1

I have configured Dlib face detection/recognition in HA, and while that is working really good, I have a problem with the scan interval of my Generic IP Cameras. As far as I can tell, pictures from generic cameras are refreshed every 10 seconds, and face detection can only take place when a new picture is available. For face detection, this setting is too high - I can’t stand in front of my camera up to 10 seconds before my face is recognized (without looking a little stupid at least).

Under the Image Processing Component, the following is suggested:

For interval control, use scan_interval in platform.

I have tried this. My configuration is as follows:

camera:
  - platform: generic                                                                                                              
    still_image_url: http://192.168.x.xx:8080/stream/snapshot.jpg                                                                  
    name: Kitchen                                                                                                                  
    username: admin                                                                                                                
    password: !secret camera_password                                                                                              
    authentication: digest                                                                                                         
    scan_interval: 2

This, however, does not work.

So my obvious question is: How can I change the scan_interval to a lower number for the cameras where I want to add face regognition? Is it at all possible?

1 Like
2

were you able to change the scan interval? if yes, can you share?
thanks

3

Hi,

Unfortunately I was not able to change the scan interval. I have tried lots of options, but as far as I can tell there is no workaround. This makes face recognition i HA pretty useless for me, and I have put the project on hold.

Apparently, when using the Android IP Webcam you can change the scan interval down to 1 second. This would be perfect, but it does not work for the generic camera component.

4

thanks for the Info.

5

Hi…

Could you provide me details how did you implement this successfully as a working model.

10 seconds delay is OK for my application.

Thanks.

6

Hi KvRajan,

Sure! Here is what I did:

camera:
  - platform: generic
    still_image_url: http://192.168.x.x:8080/stream/snapshot.jpg
    name: Kitchen
    username: admin
    password: !secret camera_password
    authentication: digest
    scan_interval: 2

Of course - the scan_interval is not working, but I left it there in case it suddenly would :wink:

image_processing:
  - platform: dlib_face_detect
    keep_faces: True
    keep_no_faces: True
    source:
      - entity_id: camera.kitchen

  - platform: dlib_face_identify
    keep_known_faces: True
    keep_unknown_faces: True
    source:
      - entity_id: camera.kitchen
        name: "Kitchen Face Recognition"
    faces:
      thomas: /var/opt/homeassistant/pics/thomas1.jpg
      paula: /var/opt/homeassistant/pics/paula1.jpg

The “dlib_face_detect” will just detect faces, and give you a number of faces it is currently detecting. Adding the second entry, “dlib_face_identify”, will also identify faces from pictures that you have stored locally on your HA server.

I think that’s just about it :slight_smile:

-Thomas

1 Like
7

Hi…

Thanks for sharing the config details.

I’m not at that level yet and hence need the steps needed to carry out from scratch for this to work - what all needs to be installed [pre-requisites] and how to test it at each phase to come to this stage successfully.

Thanks in advance.

8

This is a bit of an old thread, but new developers may find this useful: there is now a “framerate:” configuration variable. This allows to update an image down to once a second by setting it to 1.
Unfortunately, decimal values are not allowed. These could have allowed to lower the refresh down to once ever few seconds or even larger intervals…

1 Like
9

I was about to write a bug on this, but I’m not sure if that is correct… is this a bug, or should it be a feature request? Or are we all doing something incorrect?

camera:

  • platform: generic
    name: meteogram
    still_image_url: !secret meteogram_url
    content_type: ‘image/gif’
    scan_interval: 10800

The scan_interval is ignored and it pulls an image every 10 seconds. The site admin blocked me because it was hammering his site. And he was being very nice - in reality the token is tied to a credit card and there is a charge for every hit if the requests are too frequent (which makes me wonder if I want HA to be doing this anyway even if this works… a bug could reintroduce a problem in the future).

I assume that it would be possible to work around this by having a script running in the background that pulls the image and then have HA display the image from a file. Anyone ironed that approach out and would like to share?

Thanks!

10

My issue is still unresolved, but if I am not mistaken, the value “scan_interval” is removed from the documentation. I am guessing that this is now set to 10 seconds, and that you can not change it.

This would be a feature request I guess, as the component is working like the documentation says (although the image interval time is not mentioned there).

11

Someone already had a feature request for this… I’d encourage everyone to go vote for it:

12

Playing with TileBoard, I find that I can set the refresh both the camera thumbnail and the zoomed in (big) view. They both work. So It MUST be possible…
Two possibilities here:

  1. Use TileBoard
  2. TileBoard sits atop HA. So figure out how/what TB is doing. Going to drill down there.
    I am using camera platform mjpeg to control several DLINK DCS-5020Ls. I have been unable to affect the refresh in HA, have tried all the plausible things, etc.
13

Is there any followup here?
Sorry about necro’ing this thread, but I have my grafana graphs set up as generic cameras.
Each ha user screen displaying them causes the 10s 'ish call to grafana & therefore influxdb.
These (docker) containers then become unnecessary flooded & less responsive.

14

Sorry for an additional thread necro, but I have searched and am coming up empty.
I have added an ESP32-CAM as a generic IP camera. I added the still_image_url only.
In the dashboard, it seems to be refreshing every 10 seconds and if I click to zoom, it refreshes pretty much as fast as possible. I have modified the camera code to use the LED flash, so it is flickering away quite rapidly.
I would like this to:

  • Take an image only once on demand
  • Store and display the last image captured
  • Automate this to take a snapshot at a specified time once per day (or on a similar schedule)

These don’t seem to be unreasonable requirements, but I am not finding any relevant info. The scan_interval parameter seemed to change nothing. Thanks for any help.