Your Gate, Your Lock, Your Lights: License Plate and Face Recognition Automations in UniFi Protect

A camera that recognizes your truck’s plate is a party trick until it does something with that knowledge. UniFi Protect now does: a recognized plate or face can open the gate, unlock a door, turn on the floodlights and tell the rest of the house you are home, with no clicker, code or app in hand. This is how the pieces fit, what we actually set up on a Utah property, and the two automations we refuse to build.

What Protect can recognize

Every modern UniFi camera classifies what it sees as a person, a vehicle, an animal or a package. The AI-series cameras go further and read license plates and faces on the camera itself. Protect keeps those as identifications: a named person with the faces Protect has learned, or a vehicle with its plate. Once a plate or a face has a name, it becomes something an automation can key on.

Since Protect 7.2 the console can also run second-stage verification: when a camera is not sure what it saw, the event is re-checked before any alarm fires. That is the difference between a floodlight that comes on for your car and one that comes on for every raccoon. The AI LPR is the plate camera for a driveway; the AI Pro handles faces and plates at a front entry.

Where the automations live

Protect, Access and Network share one automation screen called Alarm Manager. Each alarm is a trigger, a scope and one or more actions. For recognition the triggers sit under ID Recognition: known face, unknown face, known plate, unknown plate, person of interest. The scope is a camera or a set of cameras. Every trigger can carry a schedule, so “unknown person at the side gate” only fires after dark, and Ignore Repeated Actions stops one visitor from generating twenty pushes.

The actions are what make this useful. Notify pushes to the people you choose. Light turns on floodlight cameras and camera LEDs. Sound plays a tone through the AI Horn speaker. PTZ swings a pan-tilt camera to a preset. Unlock Door opens a specific door or gate through UniFi Access. And Webhook sends a request to any URL, which is how a recognition reaches the control system that runs the lights and shades.

Four automations we set up, and how

1. The gate opens for the family’s cars. Each driver’s plates go on their Access profile. The AI LPR at the pillar reads the plate, the Gate Hub fires the operator. Unknown plate: the gate stays shut and the intercom rings the house. The hardware side is in our gate and intercom guide.
2. Driveway lights for a known plate after dark. Trigger: known plate on the driveway camera, scheduled sunset to sunrise. Actions: Light on the floodlight camera, plus a webhook to the control processor that runs the Lutron landscape scene for ten minutes. The garage courtesy lights come on the same way.
3. Unknown person at the back of the house. Trigger: unknown face or person on the rear cameras, 11 PM to 6 AM. Actions: Light, Sound through the AI Horn, Notify the owners, and a PTZ preset on the yard camera so the clip is worth watching. The alarm panel is a separate system and stays armed on its own rules.
4. Service door for the housekeeper, on her days. Trigger: her face at the mudroom door, Tuesday and Friday, 9 to 1. Action: Unlock Door through Access, plus a push to the owner. Outside that window the same face does nothing, which is the point of putting a schedule on it.

What we decline to automate

Two requests come up on nearly every project, and we say no to both. Unlocking the front door on a face alone. A photo on a phone screen will not fool a modern camera, but a good print or a close relative can, and a lock is where the margin matters. For doors we use the G6 Entry, which pairs the face with a phone, a card or a PIN. Disarming the alarm on a plate. The monitored alarm is the one system that should not be convenient for a stranger in your car. Recognition can turn on lights, open a gate and tell you who is here. It should not disarm anything.

What triggers what

What it needs on the console

A UniFi console that runs Protect and Access, so a Dream Machine class gateway or an NVR, at least one AI-series camera where the recognizing happens, the Gate Hub or a door hub for anything that physically unlocks, and a network that keeps the cameras on their own VLAN. The AI Key is worth adding when the property has a lot of non-AI cameras you want in the same rules. Everything else is configuration, which is to say: our job.

Frequently asked

Does the plate camera work at night? Yes. The AI LPR is built for it, with its own illumination and a lens meant for a plate at driveway distance. Mount it low and straight on, not high on an eave.

Can two cars open the same gate? Any number. Plates attach to a person’s profile, and a household can have as many profiles as it has drivers, including the nanny’s Subaru on weekdays only.

What happens if the internet is down? Recognition and the Alarm Manager actions run on the console in the house. The gate, the lights and the horn work without the cloud. Push notifications wait for it to come back.

Does this replace the alarm system? No. Protect watches and reacts; the monitored alarm is what calls the police. We install both and keep them separate on purpose.

Can the lights be Lutron instead of UniFi floodlights? Yes, through a webhook to the control system. On a Josh.ai or Control4 house we fire a scene; the camera never talks to Lutron directly.

Is face recognition on by default? No. It is a setting we turn on per camera, and the faces Protect learns stay on the console in your house, not in a cloud account.

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Shield Low Voltage designs, installs and services Ubiquiti UniFi networks, cameras and access control across the Wasatch Front and Back. Feature details from Ubiquiti’s Alarm Manager documentation and the Protect 7.2 release notes. Images and video courtesy of Ubiquiti.