User-Defined No Detect Areas

[PhilipCohen]

User-Defined No Detect Areas

I’m just trialing the free version of Sighthound for one camera. My initial thoughts are that it is an excellent product for the purpose. However …

The hard-wired US date format is a pain; if you won’t allow the user to define the date format, to avoid ambiguity, you should at least output the three-letter short version of the month (APR) instead of the numeral (04) …

More importantly, I get too many unnecessary “detections” appearing in the “All/Unknown objects search list” pane due to a shrub waving in the breeze and another very small area picking up vehicular traffic out on the street. I have set the “region” I want positively monitored to avoid these areas, and I can set “Ignore objects smaller than:” variable, but these superfluous detections still appear individually in the “search list”, if only temporarily. What might be an improvement would be the ability of the user to additionally define multiple “regions” to be positively ignored so that they do not clutter up the search list of other “unknown objects” that may otherwise be of interest …

[ryan]

Hi Philip,

Glad to hear you're enjoying Sighthound Video so far. Configurable dates is a feature request that's come up recently. We are asking for local date time format, unfortunately some OS and locales are being a bit stubborn about this so we'll need to add the manual override option.

The default search options of All/Person/Unknown will show those for any bit of video on the system including video in the "temporary/cache" duration. If you select your rule from the list it will only display matching clips.

If you have deleted the default "any object anywhere" rule for your camera, are only saving from your new region rule, and would like all other data quickly removed, you can turn down the "Temporarily keep all video for up to X hours" setting in the app preferences.

Hope that helps,
- ryan

[PhilipCohen]

I think that I have finally figured it out! My rule was set to find "people”, inside my region when it should have been for "any object” inside my region; then one can ignore completely those other three default filters that may invariably appear "cluttered" ...

However, I have noticed the odd instance of detections “inside my region” that are marked “Temporary” but that should have been caught, and saved, by my rule (wearing a hat; partially sunlit background; one clip where I could see no logic for it not being “saved”, …); in this respect it would be an improvement if the user had the opportunity to right-click on such a “temporary video” clip and have the additional option of “Save Clip” to redefine it as a “saved by a rule” clip …

I notice also that, if you are watching the “Search view”, new detections don’t automatically appear in the search list; why not dynamic? …

[ryan]

Hi Philip,

Glad you've got things sorted out!

For the "temporary" message I'm guessing you see this only when using one of the default "Any object anywhere" type rules in the search view. If you select your region rule these messages shouldn't appear. This is just a warning that some portion of the clip (not the entirety) wasn't marked by a rule to be saved.

When a rule has a save response, it will flag all of the matching event, X seconds before, and X seconds after to be saved. Consider a case where you have a region rule defined with a save response. Let's say a person enters the camera's view at 9:00 am, is in your region from 9:01 to 9:02, and leaves the scene at 9:03. Your region would have marked the video from ~9:01-9:02 to be saved. If you later did a search just for "people" and this video was still within your "temporarily keep all video for X hours" duration, the "person" rule would display a clip from ~9:00-9:03, accompanied by the "temporary" warning, since 9:00-9:01 and 9:02-9:03 hadn't been tagged. If you selected your region rule to do a search, the clip it shows would be from around 9:01-9:02, and it wouldn't show the warning as all of that video *had* been saved.

The search view in the UI doesn't update dynamically as continuously doing incremental searches would use more CPU power which may impact performance for people just viewing the list that is currently up, or be a waste for people who tend to leave the window minimized open after they've moved on to other apps. An optional mode to continuously refresh, or perhaps a lighter "new events, click to refresh" could be interesting future potential features.

[PhilipCohen]

"For the "temporary" message I'm guessing you see this only when using one of the default "Any object anywhere" type rules in the search view. If you select your region rule these messages shouldn't appear. This is just a warning that some portion of the clip (not the entirety) wasn't marked by a rule to be saved."

No, I have had a couple of clips that appeared in my "Any object inside my region (save)" listing results, and the centre of the objects (one, was a person) did fall within my defined region, that should have been "saved" clips but were somehow marked as only a "Temporary" clips ... They are gone now so, maybe, I was mistaken; I will keep watch ...

Regardless, it might be handy to be able to optionally manually "save" a detection that logically was marked "temporary" ...

Otherwise, everything is OK ...