ZoneMinder Forums

I've been adjusting my zone settings, then having to wait to see if they work. I have an idea for a tool or a couple tools that might make zone settings easier. I would be willing to learn and help as much as I can, but do not know now to start this project.

My apologies if it or something similar exists, or if it's already been submitted. I have not found anything like it.

Comments are welcome.

1. A tool to test zone settings on an already recorded event. When I'm playing with filters, I do this by Submitting the filter, which analyzes all my captured events and acts accordingly. If I have an event that I didn't want recorded(light flash, for instance), I would use this tool to adjust settings on the zone and "apply" it to the stored event. I could do this iteratively until the unwanted affect is not raising the event. I would then run this "zone test" on the events which were proper (person walking through frame), and make sure that my new zone settings will still catch this.

2. A similar type of thing in which I can pull up the alarmed images, or a single alarmed image, of the event, with their red markings which caused the event, and adjust zone settings until the red goes away. Perhaps this is a window with a button to cycle back and forth between the alarmed frames and see the results of my new settings.

Either of these tools would ideally have a Save button and a Cancel button. I could envision this to be the standard way of creating zones.

Thanks for your time. I would have to learn a lot about the image analyzing process, and it would take me a while, so I thought I'd throw this out and see if anyone was interested.

Bill

billn77 wrote:1. A tool to test zone settings on an already recorded event. When I'm playing with filters, I do this by Submitting the filter, which analyzes all my captured events and acts accordingly. If I have an event that I didn't want recorded(light flash, for instance), I would use this tool to adjust settings on the zone and "apply" it to the stored event. I could do this iteratively until the unwanted affect is not raising the event. I would then run this "zone test" on the events which were proper (person walking through frame), and make sure that my new zone settings will still catch this.

This could be possible as long as you have enough video before the event (pre buffer) for the reference image to properly setup (warmup). You could possibly use ffserver to simulate a cam, though I have not tried this, it seems feasible.

Another thought would be to use zms to play an event back through the monitor which also may be possible and keep from having to need ffmpeg to use the feature for US based distros like Fedora.

I might have a play with this over the weekend if I find the time and remember and see what works out.

billn77 wrote:2. A similar type of thing in which I can pull up the alarmed images, or a single alarmed image, of the event, with their red markings which caused the event, and adjust zone settings until the red goes away. Perhaps this is a window with a button to cycle back and forth between the alarmed frames and see the results of my new settings.

I don't think there is anyway to go about doing this one as there would be no way to compensate for what the reference image would be without doing something as above.

cordel wrote:

billn77 wrote:1. A tool to test zone settings on an already recorded event. When I'm playing with filters, I do this by Submitting the filter, which analyzes all my captured events and acts accordingly. If I have an event that I didn't want recorded(light flash, for instance), I would use this tool to adjust settings on the zone and "apply" it to the stored event. I could do this iteratively until the unwanted affect is not raising the event. I would then run this "zone test" on the events which were proper (person walking through frame), and make sure that my new zone settings will still catch this.

This could be possible as long as you have enough video before the event (pre buffer) for the reference image to properly setup (warmup). You could possibly use ffserver to simulate a cam, though I have not tried this, it seems feasible.

Another thought would be to use zms to play an event back through the monitor which also may be possible and keep from having to need ffmpeg to use the feature for US based distros like Fedora.

I might have a play with this over the weekend if I find the time and remember and see what works out.

billn77 wrote:2. A similar type of thing in which I can pull up the alarmed images, or a single alarmed image, of the event, with their red markings which caused the event, and adjust zone settings until the red goes away. Perhaps this is a window with a button to cycle back and forth between the alarmed frames and see the results of my new settings.

I don't think there is anyway to go about doing this one as there would be no way to compensate for what the reference image would be without doing something as above.

I am interested in this, I know that this thread is 'aged' a bit but, I come from the glass container inspection industry, and one of the attractants of ZM is that it operates much like the software I use in detecting defects in glass containers, in the container inspection software we had tools that would allow us to run a capture of bottle images through the software and tweak the detections until we had it the way we wanted it. Indeed for what
we called a ROI (Region Of interest) or zone, I could run video of containers with blisters, stones, checks (cracks) and other defects through and I could adjust the filters so that I would not reject tiny "seed" blisters but larger ones or stones (darker so I could also reject on contrast) I could toss out, but I could take the video which like ZoneMinder was just a sequence of images, and run it through I could stop on a particular image and fiddle with the filters (we called them tools) until I got the defect detected properly and then press on to the next one. I wish I could program and I would certainly take a jab at it, but I can not. But if testing needs to be done I can do that.