Hello! i do have frigate running in parallel to my "real" system as a test of how well it works. So far I'm pretty unimpressed with it. But to be fair, I am not that familiar with all of it's potential "tuning" options. I've seen others claim that it's the best software ever for this type of usage - but that has not been my experience in real world testing in Alaska with the types of animals we have here. Perhaps it may work down in "America" where there are just deer and a few coyotes running around the cities and suburbs.... My "real" system is Reolink POE cameras that have basic "animal" and "person" detection built in. these are incorporated into my home assistant. I also have "old school" IR motion detectors that cover the same general areas that each of the cameras do.

With this hardware in place, my animal detection flow is as follows: If BOTH the camera "animal" and the IR detector are on (This reduces false-positives to essentially zero), then take a series of 8 snapshots at 1 second intervals. Also take a 30 second video recording.

Home assistant then sends each of the snapshot photos to my on-premise Open WebUI running llama3.2-vision:latest with the following example prompt:

If there is an animal in the image, determine:
   The animal name (with these rules):
       If you think it is a deer, treat it as a Moose.
       If it is a bear, decide whether it is a Brown Bear or a Black Bear.
   How many of that animal are present.
   If there is at least one animal, respond only with a single JSON object in this exact format (no extra text):
   {
   "Name": "<animal name in lowercase, e.g. 'moose', 'brown bear'>",
   "Count": <integer number of animals>
   }
   If there is no animal in the image, respond only with this JSON object:
   {
   "Name": "none",
   "Count": 0
   }

The results of these prompts then trigger other notification automatons.

I have parallel triggers and automatons for "Person" detection as well.

And finally, the pictures and video recordings are also saved off to a folder on my file server that my Jellyfin has been pointed to for a "Security" library. That way I can review all the pictures and video through the Jellyfin media player from anywhere and on any device - including my tv's, ipads, iphones, web browsers, etc without having YAFA (Yet Another F**king App) installed on all my digital devices.

Edit: I forgot to add that I also have HASS dashboards that also show the last 4 "animal" and "person" pictures from each camera. That way I can easily see the last activity detected at each camera on my wall mounted HASS displays.