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Fovea

Fovea (Flexible Ontology Visual Event Analyzer) is a web-based platform for annotating video with bounding-box sequences, building per-persona ontologies, generating VLM video summaries, and extracting structured claims from those summaries. Three services run side by side: a React frontend, a Fastify backend over PostgreSQL and Redis, and a FastAPI model service that hosts the VLM, LLM, detection, and tracking models.

docker compose up
# frontend       http://localhost:3000
# backend        http://localhost:3001/api
# model service  http://localhost:8000
# default login  admin / <ADMIN_PASSWORD>

Where to start​

The documentation follows the Diátaxis split:

  • The Guides are task-oriented. Each page answers "how do I do X with Fovea". Reach for these when the goal is known.
  • The Concepts explain the architecture, the persona-scoped ontology model, and the CASL-based RBAC scheme. Read these when the goal is "why".
  • The Reference is the per-endpoint, per-table, per-environment-variable detail. Use it as a lookup.
  • The Project section covers the changelog, the contribution workflow, and the stability policy.

Project status​

Fovea is pre-1.0. The model service is laid out as a Clean Architecture (domain / application / infrastructure), ships CPU-mode inference loaders (ONNX Runtime, llama.cpp, Transformers SmolVLM), carries a 2026 model catalog (including SAM 3.1, YOLOv12, YOLOE-26, RF-DETR, Canary-Qwen, Parakeet TDT, WhisperX), emits OpenTelemetry spans from every use case and model_inference metrics from every outbound adapter, exposes ThinkingTrace and ReasonedText reasoning-trace DTOs, and hardens the video downloader and processor against SSRF and path injection. Authorization runs through CASL with data-fidelity, ownership, and DoS guards wired into every route (see Project > Stability). Migrations under server/prisma/migrations/ are stable; the public REST surface documented in the API reference is the contract. See Concepts > Clean Architecture for the model-service layout and Concepts > RBAC for the authorization model.