Can I offload object detection to another server?

[justyns]

I'm currently using frigate with the default CPU detector. Unfortunately frigate is running on an older Xeon E5-2630L and this uses a lot of the cpu.

I also have three other machines with dual E5-2660 v2 cpus in them. Is it possible to offload the object detection from the main frigate instance to another frigate instance on one or more of these other servers?

Note: I do have a usb coral tpu, but for some reason it keeps disappearing from the machine and I have to unplug/replug it in for it to be detected again which causes frigate to be broken until then. This also goes through proxmox -> docker layers. I'd be happy if frigate would just use the cpu as a fallback until something better is available too, but configuring multiple detectors seems to only spread the load instead.

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Based on the available sources, Frigate does not support offloading object detection to remote servers or other Frigate instances (1)(2)(3)(4). The detectors are designed to run locally within the same Frigate instance.

Regarding your specific concerns:

Multiple Detectors: When using multiple detectors, they run in dedicated processes but pull from a common queue of detection requests from across all cameras (3)(4). This means adding more CPU detectors will spread the load across processes rather than offload to different machines.

CPU Detector Performance: The CPU detector is not recommended for general use (1)(3). If you don't have GPU or Edge TPU hardware, using the OpenVINO Detector in CPU mode is often more efficient than using the CPU detector (1)(3).

Coral TPU Fallback: There's a GitHub issue discussing fallback functionality when a Coral is unplugged, but this appears to be a duplicate of an existing request and doesn't indicate current support for automatic fallback (5).

Alternative Solutions:

• Consider using OpenVINO detector which can run on Intel CPUs and provides better performance than the CPU detector (1)(3)
• For your E5-2660 v2 systems, OpenVINO should work on most modern AMD CPUs despite having no official support (3)

detectors:
  ov:
    type: openvino
    device: CPU

(3)

The recommended approach would be to configure OpenVINO on your main system rather than trying to distribute detection across multiple servers.

📚 Sources:

1. Object Detectors | Frigate
2. Object Detectors | Frigate
3. Object Detectors | Frigate
4. Object Detectors | Frigate
5. Fallback to CPU detector when Coral is unplugged (e.g. accidentally)

[kw6423]

Bump

[easy-and-simple]

Yes you can.
Install frigate on other machine and use your older Xeon E5-2630L to open web interface to watch and control the cameras, and if you want mound its HDD as network share and record on it

And your Coral edgetpu, obviously overheats and this is why it disappears