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Feature request - variable sensitivity/more granular masking

edited February 2015 in SecuritySpy
Greetings,

Firstly, I love SecuritySpy overall -- it's great to see a native mac app for this, so thank you, Ben. I'm still in the pilot stage of my security setup. A few weeks with a multi-cam system and so far, so good, except some bandwidth problems which I'll address in a later post once I get some new router/switch hardware.

For now though, I'd like to know if it's possible (or if you have in the works) a two-tiered "motion sensitivity" feature. Imagine an inverse motion detection mask set at one level of sensitivity, and another "level" of mask set at a different degree of sensitivity.

I ask because most of my cameras are 2.8mm (wide angle) and cover both low and high traffic areas that are quite close to each other. If a car drives by, the motion triggers, but the streets are shared by pedestrians who fail to trigger the cams (my main concern). I've tried various settings, but with limited success.

Alternatively, could the mask block areas be made smaller/more granular for more precise triggering? Two of my cams are 3MP and I lose a lot of masking ability because a single masking "block" will cover the street/property line.

Perhaps there's a solution in the software I'm overlooking? Any advice or feedback is appreciated.

Cheers!
-S

Comments

  • Hi S,

    It sounds like the pedestrians are simply too far away, and therefore too small in the frame, to trigger motion detection reliably. A 2.8mm lens is rather wide angle so this will be contributing to the problem. It's difficult to picture what you are describing, so if you can email us an example image taken from your camera we will have a look to see what we can suggest (you can right-click the camera image in SecuritySpy and there is an option to save a JPEG image).

    Our blog post How to achieve effective motion detection may help.

    We currently have no plans to implement a two-tier sensitivity system or a more granular mask. The number of pixels used for motion detection and the size of the mask squares are always going to be a compromise between resolution and processing time required (the finer the motion detection resolution and mask, the higher the demand on the computer's CPU). We have chosen these values carefully so as to be the best tradeoff in most circumstances.
  • One way to do this is a super-ugly hack, as so many things seem to turn out to be. :-( You can create two "cameras", both of them pointed at the same source. Create one with one mask and a high sensitivity, and create another with the alternate mask at a lower sensitivity. This might capture the events you want, but it's... awful.
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