Dahua AcuPick

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BlueWave

Getting the hang of it
Jan 12, 2018
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Does anyone have an AcuPick enabled NVR & Camera that can provide some unbiased feedback on just how useful this AI feature actually is and if they feel it was worth the upgrade?

Specifically I am wondering how well the accuracy is and if it requires face-level cameras to accurately work or would cameras mounted on a residential roofline still allow the feature to work as intended.




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Agreed. Would be interesting to know how well it works in the real world.

I dont see it being a technology that would be all that useful in a home setting, but certainly business. The lost kid is a great example. Vandalism not so much as here in the US we no longer prosecute crimes, unless the perp is an employed, law abiding white male, in which case no evidence is required.
 
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bigredfish said:
Vandalism not so much as here in the US we no longer prosecute crimes, unless the perp is an employed, law abiding white male, in which case no evidence is required.
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This is soo sad but honestly true. Ugh.


bigredfish said:
I dont see it being a technology that would be all that useful in a home setting, but certainly business.
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My guess is that you are correct. How useful is it to track the wife or kids around various cameras in the house? I guess it would be cool to track guests or strangers around, but as you said, in a home environment with limited cams its probably a feature that sounds good on paper but is rarely actually used. Still, as someone with 20 cams at home and the type that loves to try bleeding edge tech, it "seems" cool but before I hit up AndyTech to upgrade, figured it would be best to research more.
 
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Right there with ya, I have the sickness also ;) :rofl:
 
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I have been testing, installing and playing around with the new AI AcuPick feature on the new nvr's / cams for a while and my opinion for home use, it is worthless.
I would not upgrade for this feature alone.

It does work for a higher mounted camera, I have just not found much use for it even when installing commercially.
If you wanted to see if a person was in different locations around your surveillance area it could be a little useful
For a large house or business with 8-10 cameras it is easier to look at the IVS trips in the timeline or the file list on the NVR than it is to use the AcuPick that is hit or miss.

The lost child example they use is great and would be beneficial if you had a large department store or a mall with many cameras. It also would be good if there was a large flow of people in a area as it tries to base the similarity on the image / vehicle you select.
I do not find that it is very accurate overall.

The new NVR's are worth the upgrade for the AI and the other improvements as these work very well.

If you have worked with the older version NVR's and seen them mature with the FW upgrades, you may have been in the menu and seen that some features work and others do not, it can be very frustrating.
The new NVR's has everything working.
For me, the doorbell I use does not have PIR or MD so adding this to the NVR AI allows face detection or IVS on a non AI camera.

When setting the NVR AI up, you have to select AcuPick or AI for the recorder - it says the camera and local device must be the same.
I always select AI not AcuPick for the NVR.
But I do select AcuPick for the camera when I want to use the IVS tripwires, because with the new cameras the AcuPick allows the tripwires and metadata to be used at the same time.




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Thats the one benefit I'd like to have is ability to run IVS and Metadata simultaneously. But not big enough for me to drop $600 on a new NVR and frankly, Im not even sure how much I'd really use Metadata. Nice new shiny I think would rarely get used
 
Really cool stuff if it works reliably. Acupick looks like an implementation of image similarity search, like this: Image Similarity with Hugging Face Datasets and Transformers

The idea is to encode every detected object (in images) as vectors in a vector database.

When you want to do image search, you upload/choose an image, which is then encoded also (get vectors).

Image similarity search works by comparing the vectors of the uploaded image to all the vectors in the vector database for a similarity match.

I've been looking for an image search github project that would work with the images from my BI5 + CP.AI.
The 3 key elements for this github project are a quality embedding model to get vectors for each image, a vector database and a search UI. Hopefully all available as open source.

When you deploy your own image search on your own hardware, you can control how much data is preserved in your vector database so you can possibly search farther back in time than the above NVR as well as choose different embedding models to hopefully get better search results.

Has anyone come across a github project for image search that works with BI5 + CP.AI? (so you can do similarity search across images from any cams, and not limited to the above mentioned dahua cams and NVR)

P.S #1 if you are doing face detection, you can apply image similarity search to images of faces as well. (probably not part of Acupick at this time)

P.S. #2 in addition to finding lost children, how about using this to find your missing cat or dog? I suspect Acupick is only storing vectors for person and vehicle objects. If you have your own image search, you can probably extend to other objects like cats and dogs.
 
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While I agree it makes sense in a business setting, when I got my first camera that had it, I was excited for the potential, only to be let down in that in needs an NVR with that capability LOL.

My thought was it would be a great way to quickly search for people that had walked past.

Say a person walks past and you don't recognize them - you could simply search and see if they had walked past before and when.

For that reason, I think it has a role in a residential setting.

Like @actran, I am curious if anything exists with CPAI add-ons to perform this "automatically".

I recognize that with faces, you could assign a name to each face, etc. but depending on the volume of people going past, that could become overwhelming. And then I guess lots of John and Jane Doe's for those you don't know.

Hopefully you find something similar for BI.
 
@wittaj Or we can ask Ken to add it BI5. It would make BI5 stand out from the competition. I haven't seen this in other software NVR like frigate yet.

How do we convince him?
 
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BlueWave said:
Does anyone have an AcuPick enabled NVR & Camera that can provide some unbiased feedback on just how useful this AI feature actually is and if they feel it was worth the upgrade?

Specifically I am wondering how well the accuracy is and if it requires face-level cameras to accurately work or would cameras mounted on a residential roofline still allow the feature to work as intended.
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I played with AcuPick...
It works as advertised.. It is not based on face detection and doesn't require face-levels cameras.
It works more on full body comparison, especially colours - (clothes colours - top and bottom, skin colour, hair colour), height / weight etc... It works on person image from different angles - which is huge..

Off course if there is a lot human traffic - there will be more false matches with similar looking people from past footage.. but this is not a problem - results can be sorted or limited by date - so it is very easy to find all actions of the same looking person at specific time range... A few clicks and you have very well sorted results by your criteria with video clips from all or selected cameras..

Comparing to reviewing by hand video clips from all events from all cameras in search for exact person - huge time difference..

It is good solution for companies, warehouses, shops, service points / centers etc..
It can works for home market when there are a lot of external cameras directed at street traffic.

if someone have a new system with 5xxx-S3 cams and 5xxx-EI NVR and don't require NVR local AI processing for older non-AI cameras or intercoms - it is free for him to run AcuPick in system..
 
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Dahua are planning on making the function better I have been told by their reps. Also wont just be on 5 series and above. Plan is to go to 3 series too. Expect it to get better over the next year.
 
It works good in a multi-story building or say a store.

He is an example. A kid got separated from their mom in the store/building.

With Acupick, they can find the kid on the video and then it will show where the kid has been seen on other cameras and possibly his last location.

Around my home, nobody should be on the side or back of my house that I haven't invited, so if Joe Perp is walking in front of my house, I don't need acupick to tell me if he went to my side or back yard as I would get a notification.

Further, acupick disables the use of video metadata and most residential uses will find that to be more useful than acupick.

Doesn't mean there isn't a use in a residential setting, an apartment complex or rental may be a good use, but for the typical homeowner it just doesn't add much value.
 
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wittaj said:
It works good in a multi-story building or say a store.

He is an example. A kid got separated from their mom in the store/building.

With Acupick, they can find the kid on the video and then it will show where the kid has been seen on other cameras and possibly his last location.

Around my home, nobody should be on the side or back of my house that I haven't invited, so if Joe Perp is walking in front of my house, I don't need acupick to tell me if he went to my side or back yard as I would get a notification.

Further, acupick disables the use of video metadata and most residential uses will find that to be more useful than acupick.

Doesn't mean there isn't a use in a residential setting, an apartment complex or rental may be a good use, but for the typical homeowner it just doesn't add much value.
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excellent info
 
So if I have a new Camera that has AcuPick functionality and do not have an NVR (I use Blue Iris), should I disable the AcuPick in the camera? I'm assuming turning it off will reduce processing power used by the camera.

Is there any benefit to leaving it on?
 
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