Lost database; got image files; sift through image files?

[agoodm]

Hi,

There was an incident recently caught on one of my cameras. The date range during which the incident took place is known to within a couple days. My motion analysis seems to have missed the incident - thus preliminary looking at the timeline hasnt shown it occuring.

Therefore I wanted to fast forward through the incidents very quickly - say about 25x, however due to a ongoing bug (?) with zoneminder if your events are of low fps then playback framerate totally sucks in 1.23 on. So I knew there was a patch for this, so I apt-get source zoneminder and patch/recompile/reinstall. Somewhere in this zoneminder lost access to the image files and zmaudit has dutifully purged all my entries from the database. So I am fucked in this regard.

At this point I turned zmaudit off and copied all the image files to another disk.

I need some way to analyse these images for motion so that I can try to sift through them more efficiently. Any ideas?

[Flasheart]

Not as far as I know, sorry

You can identify from the file structure which camera (second level) and what time (filesystem time with ls -lt) but other than that you've got some slow work ahead of you unless someone else has a bright idea.

Maybe stick the files on a desktop pc and use automatic thumbnailing to review?

[kevin_robson]

Is there no way of getting the DB back? Would be worth checking forums for your distro in case it does automatic backups, and or transaction logging. There MAY be a way to reverse the purge.

Otherwise, I guess you are looking at taking a copy of all of your jpegs.
Then on the copy, you can write some shell script to remove maybe 4 out of 5 frames. Perhaps less.
Then another bit of shell to rename files to ordered and dated filenames, and copy them into a single directory.
From there you can scan one at a time, or even maybe use ffmpeg to create a mpeg file?
If jpegs have timestamp, you can narrow down anything you find to the original event?

Not sure how well any of that would work in practice, might be quicker to take the hit and scan through it.

Dont know if any of that helps, but in the absence of any other advice I thought I'd reply anyway.
Good luck anyway.

[agoodm]

To update:

I have completed a postmortem of this situation. What happened was my recompiled zoneminder deb file for some reason places images in /usr/local/zoneminder/images whereas my original install had them in /var/cache/zoneminder/images. So thats why zmaudit trashed my database. Suggestion to other people updating is temporarilly disable zmaudit until you have made sure you can still play your old files properly. I couldn't and spent some time scratching my head then the next thing bam there's no events anymore.

Looking through the recorded images it seems that its unlikely my current zone configuration would have caught the incident. It certainly doesn't detect me near the car reliably. So perhaps I would of had to look through the images again anyway?

What I have done is copied all the images off the zoneminder box onto my NAS. I am presently learning a bit of C and working towards getting Into (http://intopii.com/into/) to scan my image files. More on trying to get this to work in the User Contributions forum.

[agoodm]

I have successfully created a program that will go through, crop and then threshold the cropped area in my footage relatively quickly (limited by the speed of my disks handing all the tiny files)

I have now narrowed the 2 million frames to 70000 and have a file with a list of all the file names. But once again stuck for how to use this list of files in a meaningful way. Any suggestions welcomed.