Issues with ONVIF when multiple BI cameras point to single physical camera

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jlvaldez
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2020 10:54 pm

Issues with ONVIF when multiple BI cameras point to single physical camera

Post by jlvaldez »

Hello all,
I'm a new BI user. Overall, I like the flexibility and it allows me to easily integrate my personal machine vision program into home automation.

To give a quick summary of how I'm running my software:
1) BI has a *_live postfix version of a camera, which only listens for ONVIF motion events (from camera to offload CPU)
2) When ONVIF motion event is received, BI dumps a single frame every second to a folder (using one of the AUX folders).
3) OUtside of BI: I have a python script that monitors this folder, when it finds new folder, it sends the image to my openCV instance to do object detection. It determines if it should alarm or not based on parameters I configure. Once it determines an alarm should happen, it sends an admin command to BI's web interface to trigger the main camera, to mark the event.

An example is I have 2 cameras in BI. One called front yard, the other is called front yard live. Front yard live doesn't record/store any footage. Only listens for ONVIF events, does flow above. front yard is triggered by the external program via the web interface and will mark the event as an alert. I do not want ONVIF events to be marked as an alert (easy enough with 2 cameras total).

My problem is when I reboot BI, I have to disable all of the "main" cameras (not the live ones) and re enable them, otherewise the "live" cameras do not receive ONVIF events. This is very repeatable in my setup. I noticed that BI marks "duplicate" cameras (pointing to same IP) with a "*" after the name. If any of my "live" cameras have a * after the name, it will NOT receive any ONVIF events, for some reason. So I must toggle the main camera to disable, thus marking the "live" camera as the primary, then I can enable the "main" camera and everything works.

What's up with this? Makes headless boots impossible.

I thought about running this all from a single camera, but my problem is that ONVIF events would trigger an alert, and I don't want that to happen. Then it would also break by any time the machine vision triggered the channel, the channel would loop back on itself and continue exporting JPGs. I'm not sure if there's some way to define what actions happen for specific triggers. IE: if triggered by ONVIF, then dump JPGs every second until ONVIF signals no motion. If triggered by external web command, set an alert.
jlvaldez
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2020 10:54 pm

Re: Issues with ONVIF when multiple BI cameras point to single physical camera

Post by jlvaldez »

I can't be the only one to have this issue?

It's easily reproducible. Have 2 cameras set up for same IP cam. Configure one for ONVIF. Depending on which of the 2 cameras has a * next to its name, it may or may not receive the ONVIF events.
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