2024.12.5
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Image processing

Image processing enables Home Assistant to process images from cameras. Only camera entities are supported as sources.

Note

Building block integration

This image processing is a building block integration that cannot be added to your Home Assistant directly but is used and provided by other integrations.

A building block integration differs from the typical integration that connects to a device or service. Instead, other integrations that do integrate a device or service into Home Assistant use this image processing building block to provide entities, services, and other functionality that you can use in your automations or dashboards.

If one of your integrations features this building block, this page documents the functionality the image processing building block offers.

The state of an image processing entity

For face recognition applications, the state of an image processing entity can be the name of the detected person or motion that was detected.

In addition, the entity can have the following states:

  • Unavailable: The entity is currently unavailable.
  • Unknown: The state is not yet known.

ALPR

ALPR entities have a vehicle counter attribute vehicles and all found plates are stored in the plates attribute.

The found_plate event is triggered after OpenALPR has found a new license plate.

# Example configuration.yaml automation entry
automation:
- alias: "Open garage door"
  triggers:
    - trigger: event
      event_type: image_processing.found_plate
      event_data:
        entity_id: openalpr.camera_garage_1
        plate: BE2183423
...

The following event attributes will be present (platform-dependent): entity_id, plate, confidence

Face

Face entities have a face counter attribute total_faces and all face data is stored in the faces attribute.

The detect_face event is triggered after a Face entity has found a face.

# Example configuration.yaml automation entry
automation:
- alias: "Known person in front of my door"
  triggers:
    - trigger: event
      event_type: image_processing.detect_face
      event_data:
        entity_id: image_processing.door
        name: "Hans Maier"
...

The following event attributes will be present (platform-dependent): entity_id, name, confidence, age, gender, motion, glasses

scan_interval and optimizing Resources

Image processing integrations process the image from a camera at a fixed period given by the scan_interval. This leads to excessive processing if the image on the camera hasn’t changed, as the default scan_interval is 10 seconds. You can override this by adding to your configuration scan_interval: 10000 (setting the interval to 10,000 seconds), and then call the image_processing.scan action when you actually want to perform processing.

# Example configuration.yaml
sensor:
- platform: _AN_IMAGE_PROCESSING_PLATFORM_
  scan_interval: 10000
...
automation:
- alias: "Scan for faces when motion detected"
  triggers:
    - trigger: state
      entity_id: sensor.door_motion_sensor
      to: "on"
  actions:
    - action: image_processing.scan
      target:
        entity_id: image_processing.door
...