Suriyakumarvijayanayagam 48a30d97db Live camera view in the app, and the green light that was lying about it
Two changes, and the second was found by verifying the first.

## Watching a camera from the app, in another building

Snapshots answer "is that camera working". They do not answer "what is
happening in my shop right now", which is what somebody who opens the app away
from the counter is asking. Head office's browser already had that answer -
LiveHub plus cameras.Live, where the shop PC asks outbound whether anybody is
watching and pushes JPEG frames for as long as somebody is - and the app could
not reach it.

cloud.CameraLive opens that feed and the app's own loopback relay re-emits it
as multipart MJPEG. That is the trick: frames arrive base64 over SSE, an <img>
cannot render that, and an <img> renders MJPEG natively - so a tile is an
ordinary <img> pointed at loopback whether the camera is in this room or
another city.

- Reconnecting happens in the relay, not the page. The server caps one push at
  five minutes, so doing it here means the <img> never sees the stream end.
- The headers are flushed before the first frame. Go writes them on the first
  body write, so without that the whole response waits for the shop PC to
  start pushing. Measured against production: 30 seconds and not even a
  Content-Type, which surfaces as the request timing out.
- One camera at a time. Watching makes a shop PC upload, so a grid that went
  live at once would put an estate's worth of cameras on the wire because
  somebody opened a page.
- live.mjpeg is behind the same per-run token as the engine routes, and a
  wrong token is a 404 that never reaches head office at all.
- CameraLive uses its own HTTP client: the shared one's 30s timeout covers the
  whole response and would sever a working view every thirty seconds - the
  trap that made the server set WriteTimeout to zero for its own SSE endpoint.

## A camera read "Connected" for 34 minutes after the shop PC went blind

Which is why the verification above looked like a failure: head office
registered the viewer and no frame ever came.

reportWith returns early when the engine is unreachable - correctly, it has
nothing to say - so the last state it sent stays in the database looking
current. Measured live: cam2 and entrance both reading Connected, in green,
with last_seen_at 34 minutes old, while the heartbeat from the same PC said
cameras_up 0 of 0. Two surfaces reading two stored fields and disagreeing.

false could not be the answer. It means "this camera is not connecting", which
sends an installer to check cabling on a camera that was working perfectly the
last time anybody could ask it. So there are four states and one function:

  connected       reported recently, and working
  not_connecting  reported recently, and the stream will not open
  waiting         no shop PC has ever reported this camera
  stale           reported once, and not lately

- Connected is CLEARED when stale or waiting. A stale true left in place stays
  available to every client reading the field directly, and leaves two fields
  on one object disagreeing - how the shops screen once came out labelled
  Working, in green, above "2 of 3 cameras not connecting".
- Computed in scanCamera, so every camera anybody reads passes through it. A
  state computed per handler is one a handler forgets, and this had already
  reached three screens.
- CameraStaleAfter is 5 minutes: five missed reports, not one. Same reasoning
  as three missed heartbeats - an indicator that cries wolf gets ignored.
- An unparseable last_seen_at is stale. It should be impossible, which is why
  it must not fall through to the state that says everything is fine.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KGcjxF1cNLcuwc3DAPcnfj
2026-09-30 16:48:43 +05:30
2026-09-29 16:08:52 +05:30

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.

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