The window a shop assistant stares at all day was the weakest surface in
this system, and it looked improvised because it was: navigation drawn
with text characters (◉ ☺ ▢) that sit on the text baseline and cannot
take a stroke weight, margins set inline per screen, and four large stat
boxes dominating the page while the product's entire reason for existing
- WHO JUST WALKED IN - was a list of "person.seen" rows in the corner.
Rebuilt around the person in front of it: a counter, a cheap monitor,
somebody mid-conversation with a customer.
- ui/icons.jsx: one drawn icon set, 24-unit grid, 1.6 stroke,
currentColor, so one icon works on every surface and in every state.
- styles.css: a real system. Four-step ground→raised palette biased
blue-green (this product lives in the world of lenses), one spacing
scale, one type scale, tabular figures wherever digits are compared
or refreshed in place, and the scrollbars restyled - the default
light scrollbar on a dark panel is the loudest "web page in a frame"
tell there is.
- Live: a status strip that answers "is this working" in one line,
cameras as pictures with the caption over the image, and arrivals as
cards big enough to match against the person standing there. The
four stat boxes became a slim strip at the foot, where numbers that
nobody acts on belong.
- State is carried by shape AND colour everywhere - a pill, a dot and
an edge stripe - because this gets read from two metres away and
some operators do not see red and green apart.
- Motion only where it means something: a live camera pulses, a fresh
arrival slides in once. Nothing loops for decoration; this process
shares a CPU with recognition.
Two things fixed because the screen showed them, not because a test did:
- The sidebar read "Stopped" beside a live camera feed and a counter
ticking up, whenever the engine was running but not started BY the
app. That is the two-surfaces-disagreeing bug the tray exists to
avoid. It now reads "Running outside the app" in amber, and Start is
disabled rather than offering to launch a second engine onto one
SQLite WAL.
- The arrivals panel shrank to fit its content and left a hole beside
a tall camera tile - so the layout looked broken exactly when the
shop was quiet, which is most of the time. Both panels stretch and
scroll their own content now.
Every existing class name still resolves, so the screens not rewritten
here pick the system up unchanged. Windows and darwin build; tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KGcjxF1cNLcuwc3DAPcnfj
Behavision
Production face recognition over RTSP. Watches camera streams, detects and tracks faces, recognizes known people, auto-enrolls new visitors, records visit history, and serves a live dashboard + JSON API.
Clean-room rewrite of the previous Camera/ and pattern_reg/ projects:
same core ideas, correct engineering.
Quick start (Windows)
cd D:\NEARLE\Behavision
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m behavision setup-models # downloads YuNet, copies ArcFace etc. from the old project
python -m behavision run # dashboard at http://localhost:8010
Camera credentials live in .env (gitignored) — never in code or YAML.
So do the dashboard credentials: set BEHAVISION_API_USER and
BEHAVISION_API_PASSWORD, or let the server generate one into
data/api_credentials.txt on first boot. A routable api.host is never
served without HTTP Basic auth; 127.0.0.1 is left open.
To test without a camera, set webcam: 0 on a camera in
config/default.yaml.
Enroll a person by name from photos:
python -m behavision enroll --name "Alice" --images C:\photos\alice\
Architecture
behavision/
├── config.py typed config: YAML + ${ENV} expansion, validated (pydantic)
├── capture.py RTSP/webcam reader thread: latest-frame slot, TCP transport,
│ exponential-backoff reconnect, percent-encoded credentials
├── detection.py YuNet face detector (OpenCV) → boxes + 5 landmarks, clipped
├── recognition.py ArcFace ONNX encoder (correct (x-127.5)/127.5 RGB preprocessing,
│ unit-norm output) + clamped face-quality scoring
├── tracking.py IoU tracker: identity decided once per TRACK, not per frame
├── gallery/
│ ├── index.py FAISS IndexFlatIP (exact cosine) with identical numpy fallback
│ ├── store.py SQLite (WAL): identities, embeddings, sightings — source of truth
│ └── service.py three-zone matching: match / ambiguous(do nothing) / enroll
├── attributes.py optional age, gender, emotion on the aligned chip
├── events.py async event bus → log / webhook / rate-limited email sinks
├── engine.py one worker thread per camera, shared models + gallery
├── api.py FastAPI: dashboard, MJPEG stream, identities, events, stats
└── __main__.py CLI: run | enroll | setup-models
Pipeline
RTSP ──► capture ──► detect (YuNet) ──► track (IoU)
│ once per track, quality-gated
▼
align (Umeyama 5-pt) ──► ArcFace ──► cosine search
│
┌───────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────┐
sim ≥ 0.42 0.32 ≤ sim < 0.42 sim < 0.32
known person ambiguous → retry new visitor
sighting + event on a better frame auto-enroll + event
Design decisions (and the failure they prevent)
| Decision | Prevents |
|---|---|
Per-camera FaceDetector, shared thread-safe encoder |
cv2 input-size race between camera workers |
| HTTP Basic on every route, escaped dashboard output | open biometric API on the LAN; stored XSS via identity labels |
| Percent-encoded credentials, URL built from parts | @ in password silently breaking the stream (old bug) |
| Track-level identity, sighting cooldown | one user registered per frame (old bug) |
Exact IndexFlatIP on unit vectors, -1 guarded |
inverted L2 threshold + wrong-person metadata[-1] (old bugs) |
| SQLite as source of truth, index rebuilt at boot | index/metadata drift, untrained-IVF crash (old bugs) |
| Three-zone thresholds with ambiguous no-op | duplicate identities and wrong merges |
| One color conversion, ArcFace-native normalization | off-distribution embeddings making thresholds meaningless (old bug) |
| All quality terms clamped to [0,1] | unreachable registration threshold (old bug) |
| Readiness-guarded API, sinks off the hot path | startup crashes, notification stalls |
API
| Method | Path | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| GET | / |
live dashboard |
| GET | /api/health, /api/stats |
liveness / metrics |
| GET | /api/cameras/{id}/stream.mjpeg |
annotated live stream |
| GET | /api/cameras/{id}/frame.jpg |
latest annotated frame |
| GET | /api/identities, /api/sightings, /api/events |
data |
| PATCH | /api/identities/{id} |
rename a visitor ({"label": "Alice"}) |
| DELETE | /api/identities/{id} |
forget a person (embeddings removed) |
Tests
pip install pytest
pytest tests -q
Configuration
Everything lives in config/default.yaml; ${VAR} placeholders resolve
from the environment (.env is loaded first). Thresholds:
recognition.match_threshold(default 0.42): raise for fewer false matches, lower for fewer duplicates.recognition.min_enroll_quality(0.65): how good a face must look (sharpness, size, lighting, frontality) before a new identity is minted.tracking.min_hits_for_id(4): frames a face must persist before we spend an embedding on it — filters passers-by and phantom detections.cameras[].max_width(1280): frames are downscaled at ingest — full 3MP streams waste memory and detector time.
Recognition models
The encoder picks the first usable model in models/:
arcface_int8.onnx → w600k_mbf.onnx (MobileFaceNet, 13 MB, downloaded
automatically) → arcface.onnx (r100, 260 MB, copied from the old project;
needs ~1.5 GB free RAM to load). Pin one with recognition.model_file.
Every stored embedding is tagged with the model that produced it, and only
embeddings from the active model are searched — different encoders'
vectors are numerically incompatible and never mix.