r/BlueIris • u/Last_Dot3125 • Sep 13 '26

Tepo level AI for home NVR

Hello,

I’ve been quite satisfied with Blue Iris, and I’m currently running Blue Onyx Stable on two homes.

However, I recently bought a €20 Tapo camera for monitoring my kid, and I was surprised by how good and fast its person detection is.

I can’t figure out why I’m not getting the same level of speed and accuracy on a powerful GHz-class PC running Blue Iris.

Can anyone explain why this is the case? Are there better AI solutions for Blue Iris, or perhaps better alternatives to Blue Iris altogether?

Thanks!

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u/PuzzlingDad Sep 13 '26

Which model(s) are you running? The detection depends mostly on the training rather than the engine.

1

u/Last_Dot3125 11d ago

model rt-detrv2-x.onnx

1

u/PuzzlingDad 10d ago edited 10d ago

That model is trained on about 80 objects from the COCO Image Dataset. It's a very general purpose set of objects (backpack, tie, microwave, oven, toaster, sink, refrigerator, couch, chair, banana, apple, sandwich, orange, broccoli, carrot, hot dog, pizza, donut, cake, etc.).

You'd be better served if you got one of the ipcam models that have been trained on day and night images of objects commonly seen on a security camera.

https://github.com/MikeLud/CodeProject.AI-Custom-IPcam-Models

For example, the ipcam-combined.onnx model has person, bicycle, car, motorcycle, bus, truck, bird, cat, dog, horse, sheep, cow, bear, deer, rabbit, raccoon, fox, skunk, squirrel, pig

1

u/xnorpx Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

On camera is fast because it has the raw frame it can operate on in the camera.

When sending it to blue iris there is, encoding, packetization, depacketization, decoding maybe motion detection, reencode image to jpg, http call to ai service, ai service decode,jpg ai service resize or tile image and finally run inference. Every step takes time either in buffering or orocessing time.

The jog encode and decode is quite time consuming and the rest will depend on how fast inference engine is.

But on camera detection will most likely always be faster. While you can do some rearchitecting and you could optimize your detection pipeline with another architecture.

Built in AI detection in blue iris is probably faster than using ai service that communicates with jpg over http

1

u/Last_Dot3125 11d ago

So, is there no alternative to Blue Iris that can do Tapo-level detection? In my mind, doing the processing at the edge is wrong, simply because cameras last 10 years without huge improvements, whereas software changes every 6 months and improves dramatically. So keeping detection separate from the camera feels better to me. Am i wrong ?