Too many false alarms

[alanallos]

I am on a trial version - and I like many of the features. But, I have been getting far too many false alarms from Sighthound my Foscam Fi18806W. Many of these have been triggered by a small shrub blowing in the wind - day and night, others by moths flying in front of the camera at night. The sensitivity is down to 5 (scale 5-10) in my Foscam settings. This still occurs in my edit rule - set for People - both when a region is chosen and crossing a boundary. I have lots of wasted video recordings (of the moving shrub) and false alarm emails. These are listed under people in the search.

The shrub is outside the region - and obviously cannot cross the boundary!

How can this happen - where a moving shrub or moth is detected as a person?

[ryan]

Have you tried drawing a region around the shrub and selecting "Outside"? This will ignore any objects that spend their entire duration within the drawn region.

More tips on region rules can be found here: http://www.sighthound.com/support/regio ... t-i-expect

[alanallos]

Thank you for this link. It may be easier for me to trim the shrub!

However, you did not answer my question re how this shrub - and the moths - can be recognised as People by your software? I specifically chose only people recognition - and assumed that your software would exclude all other objects.

I this not what your software is supposed to do re People recognition?

I attach two more false alarms this evening of moths recognised as People

How can I avoid this - otherwise this software is of no use to me given all of these false recognitions. This is a great pity as I really like most of the functionality!

[ryan]

I believe our tracking and recognition are by far the best in the space (and leagues beyond simple pixel diff alerting). That being said, nothing can be perfect and I certainly won't claim we are. Tasks like person recognition in particular seem like they should be trivial to us since our brains are hard wired for it, but writing algorithms to do their best with all cameras, angles, scenes, and lighting conditions is anything but trivial. We have a computer vision team hard at work on both our tracking and recognition and many exciting future updates are underway.

[alanallos]

Hi - Thanks for your reply - and I understand that this is not so easy! I will take out a full license shortly as I do like most of your features (and look forward to others)

I have trimmed the 'shaking shrub' - but is there anything I can do about the flaw alarms from the moths? There is a large road light nearby which attracts them - and bats!

[Devin]

Are these moths flying by the camera or are they landing and loitering on your camera?

If they are flying by, you should be able to eliminate most of the false detections by experimenting with the "Include objects visible longer than:___seconds" feature in the rule editor. I'd recommend setting this to one and check your clip list to see if the false detections are ignored. If you still see moths in the clip list, increase the number by one and check the list again.

[alanallos]

The moths are flying by - as they head towards the lamp. I am unable to change the objects setting from 0 - this shows up as blue - but will not allow me to change it.

Why not?

Finally, today has been windy and sunny - and so I now have dozens of false alarms from patches of moving shadows - as you can see in the photo!

These are driving me crazy and I would really like to get this working.

Thanks


Alan

[ryan]

You might want to use a 'crossing boundary' rule, as somewhat poorly mocked up in the attached image.

If you currently have a 'boundary' or 'door' rule, the time duration will not be active. These are instantaneous events and will always trigger when they occur and cannot be combined with duration settings.

If you are currently using a 'boundary' rule, you should not see clips with the screenshot you provided. Please make sure that you have your boundary rule selected in the search view to filter to the clips for that rule and are not looking at "All objects".

[alanallos]

I have a boundary rule - and as you can see from the photos I am only searching for People. Yet shadows and moths still set off the alarm!

My trial is ending tomorrow - so I am not sure what to do if there are so many problems and I cannot get them sorted.

[alanallos]

two more photos to illustrate problems