ZoneMinder Forums

Hello all,

A bit of background, I've had amazing success with ZoneMinder and it does everything I want it to and more. This is literally my first forum post ever because I much rather work at the issue until I figure it out but although ZoneMinder documentation exists, it's a bit sparse and my old stand by Mr.Google seems to always return the same 10 results. I figure someone else out there has to have had this exact same issue.

A bit of background. I have a few cameras set up to watch my front door, my driveway, my back yard, and an offsite camera connected by vpn to watch another houses front door for package thief's. Recently I decided to set up a camera in my side yard to track animal activity. I have a couple cats, a big skunk, a raccoon with babies, and likely a few other critters since I live close to a river.

Now the problem. The camera detects me just fine day and night (likely because I'm a tall pale human being who contrasts very well) but doesn't seem to detect any animal activity at night. A few nights ago I had to force the alarm to pick up the skunk and since then I've been able to modify the settings to be able to pick up critters pretty well during the day. Apparently the stray cats have a schedule they adhere to.

Just last night the raccoon (a sizable one at that) was staring at me through the sliding glass door and modect failed to pick up anything. I leave bit's of food out there, about 7.5 feet away from the camera to try and lure them into an optimal spot for modect to kick in, and I wake up to find the food gone with nothing recorded but a few moths getting way too close to the IR lights.

Is there any optimal IR night zone settings that would be perfect for this?

I'm using an D-Link DCS-5009L

Zone Settings:
Units: Percent
Alarm Color (Red/Green/Blue): 255 / 0 / 0
Alarm Check Method: Blobs
Min/Max Pixel Threshold (0-255): 10 - 0
Filter Width/Height (pixels): 3 - 3
Zone Area: 100
Min/Max Alarmed Area: 2 - 0
Min/Max Filtered Area: 2 - 0
Min/Max Blob Area: 2 - 0
Min/Max Blobs:1 - 0
Overload Frame Ignore Count: 5
Extend Alarm Frame Count: 0

I'm great with servers and networks but cameras aren't really my strong point. Any help would be much appreciated!

Interesting observations! Will have to check my IR cameras for small critters. But we really want to see just the big human size ones!

Based on this: http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... rmedPixels you may want to take your Alarm Check Method back to AlarmedPixels mode and set minimum pixel threshold to 40. This could result in your monitor picking up everything that twitches in daylight.

One work around would be to set up a new monitor for that camera that activates at night with the sensitive settings and the original monitor active in daylight with "normal" settings. Switch them with run states via a cron job.

Others may have a better solution...

Thanks for the suggestion bbunge.

I tried a few different things and I set up few new test monitors and zones to try and find the best option. So far the best configuration I've found is to keep the zone really sensitive and change the "Alarm Frame Count" to "2" in the monitor setting buffer tab. Raising the Alarm frame count prevents the zone from triggering on every slight movement and while it still does pick up nothing at times it at least doesn't flood me with false positives anymore.

Recently two Raccoon's running through my side yard were picked up but I think I still need to revise the settings so I can pick up the slower moving skunk.

I think I should note that these configurations haven't hindered the ability to capture human activity.

Perhaps use a X10 motion sensor that signals a CM19a USB transceiver with a python driver that can be queried every second via a script that uses zmTrigger.pl to start and stop the recording on the specified camera. I use the set up with great success for small animal detection at night to record with a:
HooToo HT-IP212 outdoor wired/wireless network cam
X10 MS16A ActiveEye Motion Sensor
CM19a USB transceiver with a python driver like this http://www.cuddon.net/search/label/CM19a
I wrote a PERL daemon that queries the driver for the command queue and then sends a camera record on command to ZoneMinder using zmtrigger.pl
through a small PHP script.
Works well night and day...reduces CPU load.

Great suggestion Rockedge and sorry I didn't say it sooner! I may or may not have destroyed my zoneminder server attempting to migrate it between esxi data stores causing me to rebuild it. Now that it's up again I can start looking into this.

I'm incredibly unfamiliar with x10 devices but after a brief check, super brief... like 10 seconds, I'm assuming the USB transceiver speaks with the x10 sensor? How long is the battery life on the x10 device? Would you recommend other devices or have these worked well for you?

rockedge wrote:Perhaps use a X10 motion sensor that signals a CM19a USB transceiver with a python driver that can be queried every second via a script that uses zmTrigger.pl to start and stop the recording on the specified camera. I use the set up with great success for small animal detection at night to record with a:
HooToo HT-IP212 outdoor wired/wireless network cam
X10 MS16A ActiveEye Motion Sensor
CM19a USB transceiver with a python driver like this http://www.cuddon.net/search/label/CM19a
I wrote a PERL daemon that queries the driver for the command queue and then sends a camera record on command to ZoneMinder using zmtrigger.pl
through a small PHP script.
Works well night and day...reduces CPU load.

Cool tip!