Blue Iris

Yesterday I installed the latest of my 5 cameras. It's a bullet cam which points to a small-in-width vulnerable area outside my back-of-house bedroom windows.

This morning, I endeavored to test BI's (V4) ability to trigger/record from this camera: I stuck a common household broom out the window and waved it slowly up and down in a 3-foot arc, clearly in the coverage area for about 10 seconds. BI did not trigger or record this activity even though I'd already set the minimum object size for detection to 147 (which is almost the highest amount of sensitivity).

I then walked out to the area and placed myself clearly in the coverage area for a few seconds. When I came back in I saw that BI recorded this activity successfully (and I received my configured SMS alert - COOL!).

I really don't expect to find suspicious people or bodies back there to record, but I AM keen on seeing if animals (cats, racoons, etc. as I suspect) traverse that area at night, so want to count on it to record items smaller than a human body. Yes, I'm relatively new to BI, but based on the above, can somebody provide a suggestion or suggestions as to why it recorded me, but not my conspicuous broom waving? Thanks.

I don't remember if BI4 had the ability to check existing video files for trigger action, but it can be very useful when fine tuning motion detection like this. In BI5, from the main Gui, you open a video, and right click on it to "Test run video through motion detector". Give that a try and let us know if it helps.

One possibility...

With the 'broom out the window' test method (lol), the broom would most likely appear larger in the cameras view, than a person walking in the yard. Check in 'Motion sensor/Object detection', for the 'Object size exceeds' setting. If this is enabled, anything in the camera larger than the % setting will be ignored.

If someone would sneak up next to the building, then pop there head up in front of the camera, There head would appear much larger than 25% of the cameras view.

I would set this to something higher than the 25% default... like 60%. Then try the Broom again.
But, as long as it triggers motion from the sides and from the front, your probably good.

How I test these situations, is to put the camera in continuous recording. That way, I can walk around, use the 'Broom' method... Then I can go back in the recording, like Tim mentioned, and run the video thru 'test motion' with different settings to see what triggers best.

Hmm, I'm sensing you aren't aware that the BOW (Broom-out-Window) method is the de facto industry standard for surveillance camera testing.... haha

Seriously though, thank you all for your thoughts. I'm fairly new to Blue Iris so much of this is trial and error -- it's kind of fun to try different settings and see what happens actually.

Make sure you are not using "Edge Vector" algorithm in Blue Iris camera settings -> Trigger -> Motion Sensor. I would recommend using "Simple", it is the most reliable.

I would not bother using "Object detection" unless you are using Zones (Zone crossing). Setting the "Object travels (pixels)" value too large or "Object size exceeds" value too small could cause motion triggers to be missed.