Motion Sensor Tips and Tricks

Articles associated to the Motion sensor settings and fine tuning your motion sensor.
Start with the Fine Tuning Settings article.
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varghesesa
Posts: 90
Joined: Thu Jul 11, 2019 9:52 pm

Motion Sensor Tips and Tricks

Post by varghesesa »

Introduction

Setting your Motion Sensors to provide meaningful alerts can be challenging with outdoor cameras. Below are issues faced from past tickets and my recommendations. Hopefully you get ideas on what to do with your cameras.




Tips and Tricks


Pro Tip 2: Camera time/date overlays can trigger the BI Motion sensors

Issue: Cameras keep retriggering resulting in long recordings with no events.

Fix: If you have time/date overlays coming from the cameras, the changing seconds can cause BI to continuously re-trigger depending on your motion settings, resulting in long recordings. The easy fix is to block out the section containing the overlay.

The simple check is to go to the playback window and see for yourself what is causing the camera to trigger.
playback motion.png
playback motion.png (99.55 KiB) Viewed 14499 times


Pro Tip 1: How do I more accurately choose the location where the camera triggers?


User issue: I want to fine tune my motion settings such that I capture people walking up to house much earlier. I know I can increase the pre-trigger buffer, but that would result in ALL my motion triggers having this longer delay before a trigger which is not ideal.

trigger gotcha1.png
trigger gotcha1.png (94.37 KiB) Viewed 14502 times

Couple of options.
  • Having a pre-trigger buffer (5s is always good) is a good start just to get some recording samples which can be used to fine tune the motion sensors.
  • The simple fix is to lower the minimum object size until the camera triggers further down the walkway.
    Since it is an outdoor camera, by doing so, you may start getting many more motion triggers, i.e. false alerts, which would be a bad consequence.
  • A more robust solution would be introducing a Zone B. Zone A would be the entire area of interest for the camera. Setting a Zone A is a recommended best practice (see Triggers and Alerts webinar for details).
    I would turn off Object travels because the A-B logic should provide needed alert accuracy.
    motion sensor object detection.png
    motion sensor object detection.png (28.17 KiB) Viewed 14501 times
  • Then, you can tell BI to only send alerts when there is activity in Zone B.
    zone B.PNG
    zone B.PNG (8.63 KiB) Viewed 14500 times
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