The Go halves of this product cross-compile to Windows from any machine.
The engine does not: PyInstaller bundles the interpreter and the native
wheels of the machine it runs on, so a frozen engine can only be built on
Windows. That one fact was the entire reason no release had ever been
cut - two of the three binaries were ready for weeks.
behavision-setup installs the engine from source instead. It finds a
Python, builds a private virtual environment beside the database,
installs the engine into it, downloads the models, records how to start
it in the same agent.json the app reads, and then starts it and waits
for its API to answer.
That last step is the point. An installer that reports success and
leaves a shop with an engine that will not run has done worse than
failing: the failure surfaces later, to somebody who did not install it.
The trade, since whoever runs this is standing in a shop: it needs
Python and internet at install time and takes minutes, where a frozen
build needs neither. What it buys is a release that exists.
Details that are not incidental:
- `py -3` is tried before `python` on Windows. The launcher is what the
official installer puts on PATH; `python` there is often the Store
stub that prints an advert and exits 9009.
- a virtual environment, not the system Python. A shop PC may have
Python for something else, and the engine pins numpy below 2.0 -
installing that into a shared interpreter breaks the other thing
months later and silently.
- EngineExe is written absolute. The app resolves a relative one
against its install root under Program Files, where no interpreter
lives.
- pip's output is shown, not swallowed. When it fails on a proxy or a
missing build tool it says exactly what is wrong, and hiding that
leaves the operator with "setup failed" and nothing to act on.
- the console pauses before closing. Double-clicked from Explorer, a
program that finishes closes instantly and success and failure look
identical.
Verified as far as a Mac can: `pip install .` builds the wheel and
resolves every dependency, and `python -m behavision` then runs from
site-packages rather than the working directory - which is the mechanism
this depends on and had never been exercised, because the project has
only ever been run out of its own checkout.
NOT verified: any of it on Windows. Nothing here has run on the target
platform, and the `py -3` path and the ProgramData layout are exactly
where that will show.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Pcn9asw19WGBfCEaHvNug6
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.