ZoneMinder Forums

I've been having a extremely difficult time trying to configure the sensitivity of motion detection. One thing I have noticed is once i've managed to somewhat configure ZM to safely ignore most of the daytime lighting changes of sun/trees/shade/etc, it lacks the sensitivity at night.

Last night, I caught some stranger wandering around my house, but ZM didn't really pick up his motion until he within 5-10ft of my cameras. However, during the day, ZM will usually pick up motion from 20-30ft away.

I've changed the sensitivity to try and pick up motion earlier, but now during the daytime, lighting conditions are giving non-stop false signals.

This very well may be my inability to successfully configure ZM, but I think it would be useful to be able to defines "sets" of configurations for certain times of the day. Example would be "high sensitivity" during nightime hours (user defined), or "low sensitivity" during daytime hours.

Also, if anyone is willing to try and help me better configure ZM, please let me know! I would be forever grateful and indebted!

Hi,

You raise a couple of good points. I will make a note of this and see if I can figure out the best way of solving your problem.

Phil,

I wonder whether (local) cameras might work better if they could have brightness/contrast control tweaks depending on conditions too, but those (obviously) are set at the video device level....

It all gets rather complicated.... :/

The way I'm thinking of addressing this is to introduce ZoneSets, so basically you can configure a monitor with zones and these are associated with a set. So most cameras might just have one default set but you could create a daytime and nighttime set and save different zone configurations to both. As you say though, it does make things a bit more complicated and I'm not quite sure yet what the best way to switch between these sets might be so it's a little way off just yet.

Phil,

Now that the brightness/contrast/hue/colour settings are stored in the database, is there a way I could automate switching between settings?

I'd like to have one set for daylight and another for night-time, or something like that...

Currently there isn't a way but as it's just DB settings and a restart of zmc I would think it's not impossible to script.

Phil,

Ok. Thanks. I'll give it some further thought next time I have a moment.