Motion Detection Sensitivity / Selectivity

[skeeve]

Hi,

I successfully installed ZM on my Suse Server and have 2 network cameras working perfectly - awesome piece of software

However, I have a bit of a problem configuring the motion detection. If I go down enough with the percentages to detect people, dogs, cars, etc., then I get tons of false positives from clouds moving by, which causes varying brightness on the lawn and driveway.

Any advice how I would try to correct that issue?

[skeeve]

I keep tweaking this, but I still have this problem. Just now, the motion detection didn't trigger an event, when a car drove down the driveway, but just a minute later, it records cloud shadows. I don't get it.

[Mopar93]

I'm not using 1.24, because of too many things not working correctly yet, but I've found something that works in 1.23 and I'm sure it will work in 1.24 as well.

I find a small area in the image where the sun is always shining, but not too far away from the active zone(s). It can even be a small area within a zone. I create a very small "precursive" zone. I mean real small, small enough that a cat could cover the whole zone.

This small zone is also affected by the sudden change in lighting when a cloud moves past the sun. If movement is detected in this small precursive zone, the active zones will be ignored and no alarm will be triggered.

Just be sure not to put this small zone in a spot where a car or people are likely to pass over it. But even if they do, they will go beyond it and will get into your active zone and will still trigger the alarm. But the cloud will hit all the zones at about the same time.

You could also put a small precursive zone in an area where a tree leaves a shadow that wiggles around when it's windy.

The zone I create is generally only about 100 pixels in total area. I set it for alarmed pixels. I use a minimum pixel threshold of 20 with no maximum. I set the minimum alarmed area at about 20 percent with no maximum setting.

This has worked quite well and seems to eliminate most all of the false alarms from the cloud movement.

-Maurice

[bb99]

Use the zone setting "Overload Frame Ignore Count" and the source setting "Reference Image Blend %ge" to reduce the false alarms you are experiencing. You'll probably want to return the other zone settings back near their original settings to get the motion detection back. There are plenty of posts covering this subject in detail.