ZM captures light changes but not people

ksattic · Post by **ksattic** » Mon Mar 24, 2008 2:22 pm

I recently changed from Motion (http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome) to ZoneMinder due to the user interface of the latter. However, ZoneMinder captures just about every light changes, but does not catch the movement of people at all. I have not seen it capture anyone unless I use the high sensitivity presets, and then it captures any change in noise in the image.

I have played with the settings a lot with no success. I have two relatively high noise B/W cameras for outdoors and one very low noise colour camera for indoors. I have the same problems with all cameras.

Motion has the ability to check if the change between images was due to a change in light level affecting all pixels. It also has the ability to raise an alarm only when a change is detecting spanning a given number of frames, so rapid events such as a moth flying across the camera or a sudden light change are ignored.

Are these features available in ZM or would I need to add them?

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Mon Mar 24, 2008 5:42 pm

They are available.
Your massive light change one is to set your alarm pixel max to something less than the chnages and then it will be ignored. You can also specify a blend value so if you make the blend higher then small duration chnages will be ignored.

Id have a read of the docs in this area

ksattic · Post by **ksattic** » Tue Mar 25, 2008 4:54 am

Thanks for the advice. I have spent a long time playing with settings, but still don't have a working setup. It would help if I could see the output of the analyser - a number of changed/filtered pixels or blob count, or perhaps even the processed image. That would help me choose good values.

I'll take a look in the source code to see how easy it is to output that info, unless someone can tell me it already exists somewhere.

Post by **cordel** » Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:58 am

You should find some of what you are looking for in the Documentation although the blurbs are short, the descriptions are there.

All of those features are already available and only require a a tick in a couple checkboxs to initiate.

Config tab
ZM_CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES

Debug Tab
ZM_RECORD_EVENT_STATS
ZM_RECORD_DIAG_IMAGES

No need to recreate the wheel

ksattic · Post by **ksattic** » Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:33 pm

Thanks - I already have ZM_CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES and ZM_RECORD_EVENT_STATS switched on. I was previously unable to find the "Stats" tab because it is not a tab but a link. I have located it now.

qriff · Post by **qriff** » Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:38 pm

More presets would be nice... Examples, tutorials in plain english.

Post by **cordel** » Tue Mar 25, 2008 6:01 pm

Might check here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... ne_Tunings
Could use some help as well.