Sensitive enough for plane blinking lights at night?

[timsdeepsky]

I am trying to get zoneminder to work at night detecting the lights of planes and meteors,,etc in my night sky camera....So far no luck with the settings....I am not sure that zoneminder can be set sensitive enough to detect just a few pixel changes to my zone in the image....And i wonder if zoneminder could catch an event fast enough to save all the event frames in the case of a meteor etc....Anyone have any ideas on settings for zoneminder,,that would let it detect changes of a few pixels across the whole zone and record it for my particular experiment??....

Ubuntu linux 10.04 Lucid
Kernel 2.6.32-25-generic
Gnome 2.30.2
Installed Zoneminder from repositories
BT878 capture card and bttv driver

[kingofkya]

it should be able 2 try seeing motion detect to alarmed pixles and set the amout of pixles to 10 and go up until the enviromental changes stop triggering the camera.

[timsdeepsky]

Thanks,,i will try this....

[timsdeepsky]

I wonder if i should be setting the (Min/Max Pixel Threshold (0-255))the same as the alarmed pixels....And does the amount of alarmed pixels mean that it is the amount that will cause an alarm if the change is bigger than the amount of alarmed pixels??Thanks....

[knight-of-ni]

Cool application.
I agree that this should be possible although, as you are finding out, it will likely take a bit of tweaking.

What is your frame rate set to? You're going to want to set it as high has possible if you have not done that already.

[timsdeepsky]

My frame rate is running at 30 fps....This is what my card will handle....I did not really set it at 30,,,,but it is running there....I can pick up larger light events at night,,,,but it struggles to pick up events as small as like 12 pixels....I would like for it to pick up small light events...

[SquALeD]

Hi mate, did you ever get this to work?

What settings did you use? I'm trying to fine tune the sensitivity on one of my cams at present.

Cheers,
Sq

[knight-of-ni]

If I were doing this, here are the motion settings that I would change from default (looks like you have your zone set up pretty well so I'll skip that):

• Units -> Pixels
  Alarm Check Method -> Filtered Pixels or Alarmed Pixels (experiment to find what works best)
  Filter Width/Height -> If using Filtered Pixel method, must be smaller (in pixels) than the smallest object you want to see
  Min Alarm Area -> Something very small, say 10 pixels for starters
  Max Alarm Area -> leave empty for now, but you can use this to filter out larger objects you may not be interested in (e.g. when the moon comes out from behind a cloud)
  Min/Max Filtered Area -> Same as Min/Max Alarm Area

This list is by no means exhaustive and is simply an educated guess on my behalf. Consider it your starting point. You need to experiment to find the best balance between capturing the objects you want vs. capturing noise or other unwanted objects. For example, Alarmed Pixels may be better at picking up the small objects you are interested in, but that will also make it more sensitive to noise.

Also, if you have not done so already, I recommend you spend 15 minutes and take a look at the documentation. It spells out, fairly precisely, what all the motion detection settings do. I know I still have to reread each description several times just to refresh my understanding of what the author means.

Lastly, if you continue to struggle, please make any future responses more quantitative. Provide us with all the motion settings you are using and even the make and model of camera might help.

[timsdeepsky]

Thanks for the info....I am trying these settings tonight....I will let you know how this works....The settings i were using up until now,,seemed to pick up most light changes that were occurring across a wider area....(too wide of an area for me)Maybe these settings will fare better....Thanks....

[timsdeepsky]

I have been having better control with the settings that knnniggett posted for me to try....Those settings are letting me pick up plane lights at night,,and i have captured 3 Meteors over the last 2 nights....This i was not able to do as well previously....I will post links to the Meteors i captured tonight....Thanks knnniggett....I will also post all my settings tonight,,so that i may answer SquALeD's question....

[timsdeepsky]

I have had great success capturing Meteors with Zoneminder.,,after a lot of experimentation....I have been able to filter out the Moon,,planes,,etc,,and only catch Meteors,,lightning,,and a few odd events like my neighbor blowing up his burn barrel while trying to light his trash....Here are the settings i used,,and the images in this link below....Thanks for all the help....http://www.timcline.org/meteors/meteors ... _cam_1.php