BI Questions: Push Notifications, Home Assistant Integration, Mobile App

Hi all,

I'm building out an 8-12 cam install and am looking at software options. I have research BI, Zoneminder, and am looking at Frigate. I'm leaning toward BI, but I can't seem to find a clear answer to some of the following:

1. Is there an officially maintained BI mobile app that can handle push notifications? There seems to be a $10 one with mixed reviews on the app store, and a github repo. The repo seems to have been forked by BI and is now maintained but has very little activity.
2. Can BI integrate with Home Assistant? This may also answer the push notification question.
3. How are BI users accessing the server remotely using the UI (not mobile app)? I wouldn't want to expose a windows machine on the public internet. I guess restricting to VPN access may be better?

1. The BI mobile app is supported and supports push notifications. That said a lot of people are using PushOver for push notifications rather than, or in addition to, the app.

2. I believe BI does integrate with HA.

3. I use a VPN to access the BI UI primarily. That also gives me access to my local LAN from anywhere which can be handy. ZeroTier can also be used to access UI3 in BI.

As above, the BI app does push and is pretty good all around. Worth the one-time $10 I think. There's also UI3 which is a web-based front end that you can use. I go back and forth between the two. The latter doesn't do push but works very well and does many other useful things and is quick and easy.

BI can be integrated into HA in various ways. There's a BI add-on/integration that can be used. It's no longer actively supported by the original author but still works (mostly) and some work still being done by others. Let's you easily do things like display cams, trigger cams (using MQTT), change profiles, trigger other things from cam events, etc. Also can access various functions by making calls directly through the web server.

I also use a VPN at my edge router for BI and HA. Probably the best way. Can use TeamViewer, ZeroTier, and similar. I've not tried it yet but thought I'd test the CloudFlare tunnel with BI when I get a chance. Works with HA, should work with BI I'd think.

Perfect. I appreciate the answers. Thanks guys! I'll stick with BI for now and see how it goes once configured.

bennito said:

Perfect. I appreciate the answers. Thanks guys! I'll stick with BI for now and see how it goes once configured.

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BI camera alerts can send out MQTT. BI is integrated with my HA in this method.
If you have Dahua cameras, there is a specific HA Dahua Camera service that is the bees knees (no ideas what knees on a bee looking like).
Research the Blue Iris Help File for all that Blue Iris and MQTT can do.
I also use the Blue Iris App for my android. If coupled with always-on VPN, it works as it should. Maybe I'm lucky but I've never had issues with it. It just simply works. Could it be better? Sure... but I still feel it's very powerful companion to the Blue Iris program itself.

If just wanting to view alerts or live... have you considered UI3 in a Chrome Browser via VPN?

I use HomeSeer with BI. I just use straight up HTTP calls between the two. Queues are great, especially if durable, but I am at my home not a commercial enterprise and it is just one more layer to implement, debug and maintain. In my 2 years of having HomeSeer and BI integrated with each other, I don’t believe I have ever had a call not honored.

I have about 62 sensors connected to HomeSeer and 16 cameras running through BI (with AI of course!)

I use the BI app and it is very reliable. My wife uses the app regularly as well and that says a lot for its ease of use.

BI without home automation makes BI not as attractive for me. Having them together is a very effective combination (in my case, HomeSeer).

I strongly recommend that you have AI in your equipment chain somewhere for the camera setup. Any system without AI in today’s world is simply too many steps backwards for the final setup to be considered robust. Meaning, if you have any outside cameras, the number of false alerts will be untenable without AI.

@Holbs UI3 is likely what I'll end up using via VPN. Part of this running of cat6 will also introduce Unifi APs and PFsense which will give me more options in securing the network / walling-off portions of it.

@DanDenver The AI discussion came up at work as well. I just don't see the use-case. I'm mainly setting up cameras to capture some road traffic (I'm at the mouth of a large subdivision), some perimeter recording, and some indoor recording at choke points. Admittedly I have not played with advanced features like tagging people and such, but once I do, maybe I'll find a use. The only alerting I have now is my ring doorbell cam of which I don't really care unless someone rings the doorbell. ;-)

bennito said:

I'm mainly setting up cameras to capture some road traffic

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My confusion. This thread kicked off asking about alerts, but now I understand that a traffic monitor is more of the goal. Sorry for the misunderstanding!

@DanDenver Yep, my bad. I was really looking to see if BI could integrate with my iPhone for push notifications of any kind of motion when I first posted. The more I dig into this forum, I'm rethinking camera placement and considering face-detection for alerts now. A lot to unpack here.

bennito said:

any kind of motion

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Trust me you're going to want to use AI.

That’s cool, this is a fun zone to play in for sure.
Not sure what you mean by face detection. The movies pump it up, but in reality it is not as serviceable as you might think at this time. AI can do face detection but only under fairly specific conditions, either way, in a neighborhood setting, not sure it will work well enough to have any value add.

AI in the security camera world is more generally used to place intelligence into filtering what is being caught by the camera.

For example. A camera viewing a front yard that has a tree might alert just because the wind shifted the limbs or a dog runs by. That would be called a “false alert”. I used to get them all the time before AI!

In the same example but with AI running, AI can tell that the moving tree or running dog is not something that you care about (unless you tell it otherwise, of course).
Assuming you have AI setup to detect a “person” (which has nothing to do with their face) you would then only get an alert when a human enters your front yard.

Walaa!! No false alert with AI in my little front yard scenario.
But the lesson learned here is that when you do get an alert, you know that you need to pay attention as you will know with a high level of confidence that someone has entered into your front yard. That is the value add of AI.

Does AI remove false alerts 100%? Nope. Is it many times better than getting false alerts all day and all night long? Yep.

I will tell you this much, if I am running errands and I get an alert and my family is home, you can be d*** sure I am checking my cameras to see what is going on. When I ran without AI everything would be alerted on and I just ignored the entire install. Might as well not have installed the cameras as I could not rely on the camera system for anything (other than reviewing footage at some point in the future - which is pretty counter productive if anything were to happen). Now when I get an alert I know I need to pay attention and take action. Very empowering stuff.

On the fun subject of face detection I have my system setup where if I look at the camera in the upstairs loft, AI recognizes me and turns on the dining room light on the main floor. No one else can trigger the light on. Kind of a party trick.
Why? No reason, I just like playing with facial recognition and I already have BI integrated with HomeSeer (home automation). It took about 15 minutes to setup from taking a picture of my face to entering that into the BI AI to adding an event into HomeSeer.
Haven’t found any serious applications for around the property. I won’t use it to unlock any of the doors, though it is totally an option as I have smart locks everywhere.
Just having fun!

So on the topic of AI integration with cameras, would commodity (Amcrest, Reo) cameras suffice for most use-cases, considering all of the Deepstack/AI processing is being done on the server and not the cam? I know going with higher end cams will give you quality and optics advantages, but for someone starting out, with easily-swappable camera setups, would the ~$100 cams be "good enough"?

Amcrest yes, reolink no.

Stick with decent cameras, not consumer grade junk like Reolink. Amcrest is an OEM of Dahua, features stripped and lower end components and housings. You get what you pay for, as with everything.

Face detection with a PC based AI program isn't what you might expect. The problem becomes the size of the model, reference images, needed for reliable detection. To do it "right" you basically need to create your own model and that can be a long, tedious, project. On the other hand, for vehicle detection it works quite well. I have three cameras monitoring street traffic, and that's not their primary duty, that catch probably 99.5% of the vehicles and people on the street. On top of that it removes so many false triggers.

DanDenver said:

On the fun subject of face detection I have my system setup where if I look at the camera in the upstairs loft, AI recognizes me and turns on the dining room light on the main floor. No one else can trigger the light on. Kind of a party trick.
Why? No reason, I just like playing with facial recognition and I already have BI integrated with HomeSeer (home automation). It took about 15 minutes to setup from taking a picture of my face to entering that into the BI AI to adding an event into HomeSeer.
Haven’t found any serious applications for around the property. I won’t use it to unlock any of the doors, though it is totally an option as I have smart locks everywhere.
Just having fun!

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Can you expand on home you do facial recognition triggering HS events. I have some HS/BI events for alerting camera when gates open and turning off camera alerts when certain sprinklers are on but how to get person by name to trigger? I have some cameras already detecting person and my face and shows alert with person and name percentages so I am mostly setup just got to get info to HS.

So just to confirm, you need to have the facial recognition setup in BI like so:

Then of course you must upload a photo. Best to change the default name to something useful - like "DAN"

Then go into the AI tab for the camera in question and tell AI to look for "DAN":


Then go into the alert tab of that camera and fill it out thusly:

Note the field "Required AI objects" where the arrow is pointing. There you will see "DAN"

This is the call to HS in text (use your IP address of course):
192.168.1.41/JSON?request=runevent&id=124
This is the HTTP header in text:
Content-Type: application/json

The number "124" above is the number in HS associated with an event that you have already created.
In my install, event number "124" turns on my chandelier in my dining room to 100% after waiting 4 seconds.
If you do not know your event ID, run this command in a browser (use your IP address of course):

http://192.168.1.41/JSON?request=getevents

Hopefully you have a JSON parser plugin in your browser like this one for chrome
Either way, just search for your event name manually.
Once that call returns it will have the associated ID listed for every event in your HS install.

Notes:
This setup works where BI and HS are on the same subnet so that HTTP calls can reach from one to the other.
If this is not true, you may need a queue - preferably one that is durable of course.
This is a complication I choose not to have. In 2 years I have yet to have a HTTP call dropped.
But I understand that some people just like queues. I know, I am a professional back end developer.

Note that the camera in question is triggering every 2 seconds.
This setting is set on the trigger tab on the bottom where it says "End trigger unless re-triggered within".
This setting determines the pace of how frequently the AI will scan for a face.
You may opt for a clone for this facial recognition setup so that you can scan for a face every 1 or 2 seconds on the clone and possibly a less frequent interval for other alerts.

I find facial recognition to be a pain in the peanuts (read: inconsistent). So a scan much less than every 3 seconds becomes an unbearable wait time as it can take up to 20-30 seconds for the system to recognize me and trigger, and that is with a 2 second scan frequency. That 20-30 second time frame I spoke of is with me about 3-4 feet from the camera in good lighting.
For my setup, if I am more than 5-7 feet from the camera the failure rate makes facial recognition useless (2.8mm cam).

Oh yeah, when I had this setup in my garage to turn on my music (SONOS), one day my wife took out the trash and she turned on the music. My picture is the only one I ever registered with BI. So yeah, I would never use this for mission critical events.

DanDenver said:

Then go into the AI tab for the camera in question and tell AI to look for "DAN":

Click to expand...

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the tutorial. Where in the camera setting is this AI tab found?

In the trigger tab