Frigate Error notifications

[Morphy99]

Not sure if this is on the roadmap but thought I'd bring it up here as I couldn't see anything in the discussions.

For those using Frigate in a security camera scenario it would be beneficial to have a way of detecting the tampering of a camera and general errors with Frigate. I wouldn't have thought this would be too difficult to implement but for me it's a highly valuable feature for piece of mind. In my head these scenarios would need to be considered to start with:

- Stream dropped or failing: This is a no-brainer as it's already picked up in Frigate logs. It just needs translating to a function.
- Physical covering of the video capture lens: x% of pixels changed in y amount of frames. Some tests would need to be done or other evidence gathered to establish a default value and maybe have it configurable via the settings.
- Stream freezing: I've seen this with a reolink camera where it output a stream via it's RTMP server however the image was frozen from hours ago. A bit of a niche error but if a date time overlay is active, easy enough to detect.

All these errors could have their own status with a mqtt message being broadcast, HA integration would then handle the notification side of things.

[RichardUUU]

If you are integrating with HA, can you monitor sensor.mycam_camera_fps to determine if the stream drops?

[Morphy99]

Ah yes that's a good idea. I will set up an automation to notify if any of them drop. I'm not sure it would always work though as I have a feeling when the Reolink's RTMP stream crashes, it still outputs a picture but it's frozen. So I'm not sure there is a FPS change.

[twau]

Dropped and frozen streams I catch with a dumb cronjob that runs every two minutes on my frigate server.
Worked well on my setup. I curl the api/stats page and check the camera fps on the camera named 'Uteplats', if its 0 I restart the container.

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$(curl -s https://localhost:5000/api/stats | jq '.Uteplats.process_fps')" = 0 ]
	then
		logger "Error: Uteplats process_fps = 0 - restarting frigate"
		/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /opt/frigate/docker-compose.yml restart
	else
		exit 0
fi

[Morphy99]

That's another way of detecting the FPS change yes. I'll probably use HA though as I get notifications through that.

[NickM-27]

This is being worked on in #3243

[JesperWe]

But I guess this does not cover the camera getting spray painted or covered?

[NickM-27]

No, that would require much more sophisticated detection to be accurate / not have false positives. Could come later through the same system

[SonarClouds]

Wouldn't it be possible to train the "normal" condition/image of a camera. Then test against this every xx seconds and then trigger an event if the score is below a threshold (for a certain amount of time).
Seasons of course would have to be part of the training material. But I suspect that after a spray attack the score should be quite low.

Another option could be to calculate the lowest SNR across the image over a time span and if it drops for a longer period of time below the lowest value consider the camera tempered?

A real failsafe solution will be hard to find as there are always edge. Maybe if I am bored I will try to test the SNR variant.

[dlong500]

@NickM-27 Any updates on error notifications? I'm not using HA. I'm also not looking for UI notifications, but rather some type of automated notification whenever there is any type of error in the frigate logs for a 24/7 camera configuration. I'm sure I could figure out something myself by just parsing the log file in a script run via cron job but it would be much nicer to have some basic notifications configurable by frigate.

The ultimate goal is to not have to worry that a camera hasn't been recording for days because of some error that wasn't noticed. Obviously the physical server and docker container would need to be monitored separately, but as long as frigate is running I'd want notifications about any errors showing up in the frigate logs.

Maybe I missed something that can provide this, but I tried searching through all the docs and issues.

[NickM-27]

this is much more complicated than it seems. For frigate to deliver notifications (without something like HA) it would have to be done in the browser. And for that to work you would have to be connected via https.

For now you will need something like NodeRED or HomeAssistant to deliver the notifications, perhaps in the future frigate will offer a way to send notifications directly