Home Assistant Integration: Limiting Entities

[dolai1]

Hello. I have a large-ish installation with 27 cameras and 10 zones, at present. I already use many motion and object masks. I detect three object types right now (person, car, horse), but would like to expand that with a few others (bird, cat, etc.) to reduce false detection events (right now, these get detected as "person").

The trouble is that I already have ~1100 entities in my Frigate Integration. Many are not important to my application of the Integration, and virtually all of the ones that are going to be added are not going to be important. Really, I'm interested in a couple of object types for ~half of the zones and only one for the remainder. I'm much less interested in objects in individual camera FoVs.

How are users reducing the burden on the integration / HA side?

I understand that I can disable individual entities on the HA side, but that seems onerous given the hundreds, of not thousands, that will result from this change. Plus, the Frigate server is still making these available. Is there a way in the config to prevent the export of these entities to the Integration or MQTT? I didn't find a clear way to do so in the config documentation, or my searching of the discussions.

Thank you.

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Based on the available documentation, Frigate doesn't provide a built-in configuration option to selectively prevent specific MQTT topics or entities from being published. The MQTT integration publishes standardized topics for all tracked objects and zones(1).

However, you can control which objects Frigate tracks and processes in the first place, which will reduce the number of entities created. Here's what you can configure:

Control Tracked Objects Globally or Per-Camera

You can limit which objects are tracked using the objects.track configuration(2):

objects:
  track:
    - person
    - car
    - horse

(2)

Zone-Specific Object Filtering

For zones, you can specify which objects are relevant using the objects parameter within each zone definition(2):

zones:
  front_yard:
    coordinates: 0.033,0.306,0.324,0.138,0.439,0.185,0.042,0.428
    objects:
      - person

(2)

Review Alerts and Detections Configuration

You can also limit which objects generate alerts or detections, which affects what appears in the Review section. Configure this globally or per-camera(2)(3):

review:
  alerts:
    labels:
      - person
      - car
  detections:
    labels:
      - bird
      - cat

(2)(3)

What This Doesn't Solve

These configurations control what Frigate tracks and categorizes, but they don't prevent MQTT topics from being published for tracked objects. Frigate publishes MQTT messages for each tracked object type per camera and zone(1).

Practical Approach

Given the documentation limitations, your best options are:

1. Only track objects you actually need using objects.track
2. Use zone-specific object filters to limit which objects are relevant in each zone
3. Disable unwanted entities in Home Assistant (which you've already identified as onerous)

The Frigate server will still publish MQTT topics for all tracked objects, but limiting what's tracked reduces the entity count significantly.

📚 Sources:

1. MQTT
2. Full Reference Config
3. Review

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[dolai1]

So, it seems like there is not a way to limit entity creation and MQTT topics/messages; am I correct?

Along the same vein, is it possible to dynamically toggle detection of particular object types on a per-zone basis through the integration? Most of my zones exist across several cameras.

[NickM-27]

Toggling zones will be possible in the next version, along with profiles where different configs can be toggled between

[dolai1]

Oh, nice. That will suit the application well. Do you mean 0.18 and the accompanying Integration update?

[NickM-27]

yes

[dolai1]

Awesome; thank you.