Blue Iris

Good suggestions.
You should send this to BI support.

+1 for this feature

It's the first thing I tried to do when setting up zones and was surprised it couldn't be done. In the meantime my workaround will be to clone the camera, which isn't ideal..

matgyver85 wrote:

MikeBwca wrote: ↑Sat Jul 17, 2021 4:32 am Good suggestions.
You should send this to BI support.

Here is what the Blue Iris support employee said:

"What's the use case?

You have a camera pointing towards the horizon like a front door camera?

image.png

Why would anyone care about the noise in the distance?

-- Sam"

Is this guy for real?

Haha, sometimes Sam’s personality can come across a bit abrasive.

I agree with both points of view.
Programmatically, the amount of effort to do this would be greater than the benifit & use-case end result. In other words... it's not worth the effort!
Not only would each zone have different motion settings, but the trigger/alerts... would also have to be overridden.

I'm doing exactly what your referring too...
I have three cameras cloned, so that I can use different motion triggering in different, but overlapping zones.

For example, my front yard camera is cloned to 'Frontdoor', and that clone's zone covers only the front walkway & front door... with different settings.
Same for my 2 driveways. I get push notifications & MMS alerts when anyone enters my driveway and approaches my front door. It's funny to see the surprised look on peoples faces when I open the door just as their approaching the door!

The result is that I have 3 extra cameras. The overhead is minimal. BI uses the original 'stream'. Only 1 actual login to the camera - no matter how many clones of the camera there are.

Unless I’ve misunderstood the request I have to agree with @MikeBwca, not only would the zones and settings need separating but triggers and alerts would also need separating as presumably you’d want to know which zone triggered and therefore do something with that trigger.

This would also mean that BI would need to perform detection multiple times on the same stream using the differing zones and sensitivity further complicating the overall detection process.

Using clones for me is simpler and you can use groups so not have the clones on view in the main view and is exactly what it do.

In my case I have the master cam set to receive external ONVIF triggers from the cam which does the person/car detection in the specified area and the clone has simple BI motion detection enabled. This allows me to control both the triggering and more importantly the alerting.

What's the use case?

I agree that Sam can appear a little sharp, but in that response he really is asking why we would need this. Looking at the follow up responses above, we DO need this, and the only way to do this presently is to clone a camera multiple times. In my opinion, cloning a camera is a work around for missing functionality

In my head, I had envisaged the answer to be a page like the zones page having squares over the image. In its most basic form, there would be small squares at the bottom, and bigger squares as you go up the screen where the size of the square relates to sensitivity. Something close to the camera doesn't have to move very far to trigger motion detection, but something far away does. If you could then rotate it or warp it to cover other use cases, it would be good. The danger is that it becomes too difficult to set up !

After reading the responses above, I can see that my method wouldn't differentiate between a near or far detection, which is clearly useful.

Can anybody find examples on the www of how this is done on other systems ? That would give us something to read

TimG wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:11 am ...cloning a camera is a work around for missing functionality

I had suggested this way back. Since then, I've reconsidered.
I disagree. Although zoning overrides could be add (like PTZ & Zone's), adding all the settings for zoning would be so complex that it could be too confusing where everything is. Imagine having 2 or three addition zones. Having clones separate out the differences into there own area. I do have 1 cameras with 3 clones for various purposes, like, Halloween, traffic monitoring of how many vehicles go south and north. I enable them only when needed. Currently, I have only 1 clone enabled.

TimG wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:11 am In my head, I had envisaged the answer to be a page like the zones page having squares over the image. In its most basic form, there would be small squares at the bottom, and bigger squares as you go up the screen where the size of the square relates to sensitivity. Something close to the camera doesn't have to move very far to trigger motion detection, but something far away does. If you could then rotate it or warp it to cover other use cases, it would be good. The danger is that it becomes too difficult to set up !

After reading the responses above, I can see that my method wouldn't differentiate between a near or far detection, which is clearly useful.

Totally excellent idea. I had thought of requesting this, but decided against it, because I think I know what the response would be...

My thought would be to have a 'sensitivity rectangle' that could could be resized relative to the distance. So that the near edge to the camera would be wide, and the far end narrow - so it looks like the rectangle goes off in the distance. This could be resized along a road/driveway/path going off in the distance. Or, just placed.
The resulting sensitivity adjustments would be a relative value based on the distance between the sides of the rectangle going off into the distance. For example, if the far end was half the width of the near end, the sensitivity would be doubled, and the sensitivity between adjusted accordingly.
These adjustment would be made from the near end, to the far end, at the same angle the rectangles near/far end are at - and areas could be masked out like zoning.
This would eliminate the need to draw individual zones/boxes with separate sensitivities.

Thoughts? Too bizarre?

I'm with you on that one. My mind image did look like a rectangle that changed width with distance.

I'm a big believer that the wheel has already been invented, so does anybody have info about how this has been done with a different system ? I had a bit of a search yesterday, but didn't find anything useful.

FWIW, I know of at least one commercial system that gives you multiple "sensitivities" when you draw the motion detection areas, differentiated by color.

It's worth a lot ! Can you add an URL to any info ?