Walkthrough: Facial Recognition on Blink/Nest cameras, no Frigate needed

Third party integrations
1

I wanted to share the steps I found to build out a facial recognition doorbell cam system without the normal steps of having hardware analyze raw video streams using Frigate.

What you need:

  • A cheap camera or doorbell, such as Blink or Nest
  • Anything running Home Assistant, even an Raspberry Pi
  • The Double Take add-on
  • A Double Take detector plugin. I chose Amazon Rekognition.
  • MQTT

What you don’t need:

  • Frigate or any beefy CPU/GPU

The main idea here is to use the terrific Double Take add on to manager our facial recognition training and detection, but to bypass the video processing input step (so we can do this on the cheapest hardware).

My configs contain lines for both Blink and Nest. Delete whatever you don’t need.

First of all, here is my Double Take configuration which creates fake cameras for Blink and Nest which are really just a JPEG captured on my Home Assistant box. I chose Amazon rekognition for my “detector” since it offloads work from my rpi to the cloud, but feel free to try one of the others. (rekognition requires an AWS access key. Get one by signing up for AWS and going to the IAM console).

cameras:
  blink-front-door:
    snapshot:
      url: http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/blink-doorbell.jpg
  nest-front-door:
    snapshot:
      url: http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/nest-doorbell.jpg
      
detectors:
  rekognition:
    aws_access_key_id: !secret aws_access_key_id
    aws_secret_access_key: !secret aws_secret_access_key
    aws_region: us-west-2
    collection_id: double-take
    # require opencv to find a face before processing with detector
    opencv_face_required: true
    
mqtt:
  host: core-mosquitto.local.hass.io
  username: <xxx>
  password: <xxx>

Now the next trick is to get snapshots from your camera into that URL above (http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/blink-doorbell.jpg) and then poke Double Take’s REST API to process it. Here are the config.yaml additions I made for both Nest and Blink cameras:

# For Nest only
homeassistant:
  allowlist_external_dirs:
    - "/config/nest/event_media"

# For Nest only
folder_watcher:
  - folder: /config/nest/event_media
    patterns:
      - "*-camera_person.jpg"

rest_command:
  # Commands to trigger Double Take processing via REST API
  process_blink_front_door:
    url: "http://homeassistant.local:3000/api/camera/blink-front-door"
    verify_ssl: false
  process_nest_front_door:
    url: "http://homeassistant.local:3000/api/camera/nest-front-door"
    verify_ssl: false

# For Nest only, to get the latest photo into the public folder
shell_command:
  cp: /bin/cp -f {{source}} {{dest}}

Then here’s an automation I created to get Nest photos into the Double Take fake camera. (I created it in the Home Assistant UI, but I’m just dumping the YAML)

alias: Ring doorbell facial recognition
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: folder_watcher
    event_data:
      event_type: created
condition: []
action:
  - service: shell_command.cp
    data:
      source: "{{ trigger.event.data.path }}"
      dest: /config/www/nest-doorbell.jpg
  - service: rest_command.process_nest_front_door
    data: {}
mode: single

And the more complicated automation for Blink, since I had to do some extra steps to get it to take a live pic instead of serving an old cached pic. (ignore my device ids. Create this action through the home assistant UI and it will fill in your ids.)

alias: Blink doorbell facial recognition
description: ""
trigger:
  - type: motion
    platform: device
    device_id: 7a644eb4712c4c53f97e3d7c1644a8af
    entity_id: c86282f4fa7c7ddfc5042d6dc7d6c49a
    domain: binary_sensor
condition: []
action:
  - service: blink.trigger_camera
    data: {}
    target:
      device_id: 7a644eb4712c4c53f97e3d7c1644a8af
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 5
      milliseconds: 0
    enabled: true
  - service: blink.blink_update
    data: {}
  - service: camera.snapshot
    data:
      filename: /config/www/blink-doorbell.jpg
    target:
      device_id: 7a644eb4712c4c53f97e3d7c1644a8af
  - service: rest_command.process_blink_front_door
    data: {}
mode: single

Now all you have to do is go into the Double Take UI and create some profiles on the Training tab. When a face is seen, Double Take will send the results to Home Assistant via MQTT which should result in a new entity being created automatically, with a name like “sensor.double_take_david” that contains the last timestamp when it saw David.

2 Likes
2

Hello,

Thanks it’s work, but I have issue with delay.
How you solved the issue with BLINK service delay? Now blink service is updating with delay.

3

How long is the delay? My action above had a 5 second sleep and you could experiment making it shorter. Or if your internet is slow maybe you need to reduce the image size somehow so it uploads to rekognize faster.

4

I just posted this yesterday and found your post today!

My Ring indoor cam is integrated into HA via the Ring-MQTT add on where it exposes a camera sensor that displays Ring’s snapshot image. I can adjust the device settings so snapshots occur only on motion detection events. As the camera is indoors motion events are only ever triggered by a ‘person’ object.

I’m still trying to properly understand your solution but it seems like it would work for my use case and maybe I don’t even need to create a fake camera? (This could easily be a mistaken conclusion on my part, I’m still working on getting my head around the solution.)

5

Do you think this would be possible instead of using Blink/Nest via TAPO cameras?

6

or reolink cameras?