ZoneMinder Forums

Hi all -

I'm new to the forums and also to ZoneMinder. I hope this is the appropriate place for this question. Please let me know if it is not. I did not see a specific forum for setting tweaking.

Below is my front yard camera (hi res). I'm monitoring the sub stream (low res) to trigger the hi res stream capture. The issue I'm having is the when a car drives down the street it will trigger the motion alarm (this is fine for now, I can exclude later if I want) however it will NOT register motion when someone walks down the sidewalk (on my side of the street) by the road or the walkway heading to the front door. It does register motion in the walkway closest to the house.

Can anyone suggest a setting change to pick up motion from the sidewalk and the walkway to the front door? Thanks!

Running v1.36.8
Monitor->Buffers-> Alarm Frame Count = 2

I've attached pics of the front cam as well as the zone settings.

Hi There,

I think you need to divide your monitor into multiple smaller zones. Have a look at the following articles which should help:

https://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/la ... ezone.html
https://wiki.zoneminder.com/index.php/U ... or_Dummies

Hope that helps ... Guy

Hi guynew - Thanks for your reply. I have read those articles.

I do have another inactive zone on that monitor around the sawgrass is it tends to set off the motion detection when the wind blows, but that is it.

Just so I understand, are you suggesting that I add additional zones around the sidewalk so that I can lower my min alarmed area numbers in that specific zone so that it might trigger an alarm?

Thanks.

Yes, I have 2 zones. The road section detects motion for "smaller" objects than the yard.

Thank you for the tip. I setup another zone to cover the portion of the sidewalk not impacted by me tree as well as the walkway to the door. I've posted it below along with the settings for it. The sidewalk area is the triangular area in the upper right. The rectangular zone in the lower left is an inactive zone to avoid the sawgrass blowing in the wind setting off the motion trigger.

Question - I did not see this in the articles but maybe I missed it. I still have my "All" zone active. I read where any inactive zone overlapping an active zone will take precedence. That has worked out well with the sawgrass. Will the more sensitive active sidewalk zone take precedence in the area it is overlapping my all zone or do I need to somehow re-draw my All zone around it to avoid the overlap? also, do you see any issue with the configuration of my sidewalk zone? I just put it in place so I'm not sure how it's working yet.

Thanks!

If you overlap zones then you'll process those pixels twice.

I'd probably get rid of (or change) the All zone and setup one or more new ones that cover just the areas of interest - smaller zones are easier on the CPU.

It's better to not process in the first place than to do so and then exclude afterwards

As a bit of a newbie myself (see all the posts I have been generating myself!)

I found I had issues with motion detection. It turned out to be in the Camera settings, blendage! Click on the source column in the console.

Given I have a Hi res camera (Logitec C922 USB), I found that my motion would see someone walking around my back yard but close examination of the blobs showed that the person was hardly detected at all.

By adjusting Blendage in the camera, things improved.

It would be really cool if we could Export a Camera and/or Zone setup so I could simply post a sample config, but we can't (I don't think)
So, they say a picture is worth a thousand words....
I found min/max pixel threshold was an important factor too, much lower than this and I was having events fire off for no visible (to me) reason.

Blobs have to be big enough, the hope was I would ignore birds. It's so low at the moment (still fiddling) because the blendage was affecting the size of the blob.

Overload frame Ignore Count is my attempt to prevent lightning, clouds and other rapid picture wide events from triggering. I would appreciate it if anyone has any recommendations to improve my configuration. For example, I know I am processing about 10MB a second because I am going gangbusters at 30fps on the camera, but my PC isn't doing much else, so I am not worried. Other people may think otherwise, with multiple cameras saturating their network bandwidth, cpu or memory.

I might as well post under this heading...
Out of curiosity, I examine the individual alarm frames for an event.
See below, someone is walking from left to right.

The blob outline is not as I would expect.
I gather it's to do with the camera blendage setting, and my pixel sensitivity, but I don't understand why thinks like the persons chest and the plate in his hand are not being detected, when I see other situations where a blob can be detected and it's not visible to my eye.

I kind of expect the blob to encounter the whole body with maybe a bit of trail behind as the blendage kicks in over the next few frames (30fps).
A bit like the shadow on the wall, it's detected on time and fairly precisely

OK - I carved out multiple zones and tweaked the settings for each. It is now seems top be working perfectly. Thank you for the tips!!