How to avoid false alarm movement detections!

[AlienDroid 0]

I now have my new DVR in place and all seemed ok until...... The sun came out!

Was very surprised to just how often I get false positives on movement on the cams!

 

What I've done so far to remedy this;

I've turned down the movement sensitivity to 1. The scale is 1 to 8.

I have also tried turning down the brightness and contrast.

 

The above hasn't really worked, on a windy day with the sun casting strong shadows I'm getting loads of false alarms

I guess I'm a bit naive as I didn't expect this to happen.

 

I also can't really block out the areas in question in the setup as they are where I need to record!

 

Do all CCTV DVR's have this problem?

I assumed I would be able to at least turn down the sensitivity so that it wouldn't be an issue!

This annoying problem is creating way too many log entries so checking through them all is a huge pain.

I also wanted to leave the audible buzzer on but I'm going to have to turn this off possibly as it's going off all the time on a sunny day with broken cloud.

 

I found a possible solution from an old post here;

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=25344

Not something I really want to do for a couple of reasons, as I've already overspent, and the cables are in the ground and I almost used all the 40m of cable per cam (loads of digging)

 

In addition I seem to have some sort of video corruption when I Fast Forward or Rewind. This doesn't happen all the time. It also varies between an inch and most of the screen. This can change when I start and stop the same section of playback!

This never happens on normal play speed, but can at times make it impossible to manually look through recordings at speed! x2 x4 and up to x16. This is compounded with the false alarms as I have many logs to check.

 

Any advice welcome.

Cheers.

[Securame 0]

There is no solution to your problem. On an outdoor camera, you WILL get false positives. Branches, wind, leaves, trees, animals, rain, whatever. Even the shadow of the trees on the ground, which moves all day long as the earth rotates, so you can not mask it out.

 

The only solution is to install PIR motion detectors. With video movement detection, which is what you are using now, you can only tweak the detection zones and sensitivity to get the best results. You have already done that, and are not geting the results you need, so you need PIRs.

[AlienDroid 0]

So I was looking in the right direction then. PIR's. Well I guess I'll have to go that way but being already over budget I was hoping for something else to reduce the problem.

It seems to me the low end maybe all the CCTV DVR tech just isn't up to the job as well as it should be as a standalone device anyway, the need to put up PIR's is a part solution but not a perfect one for sure.

 

I know it would be possible to come up with a DVR that could ignore all the day to night things that cause false positives like spiders, moths, bit of paper blowing by etc but the cost to produce them would be a lot more than the basic box I have.

 

I guess I was hoping for a bit more from the tech, or at least to be able to set alarms on and off at different times on different cams, change the light and contrast from day to night, That would help a little.

In my view I think I should be able to program a device to tell it that something is a shadow! And to track it through the days and the changing position of the sun, but that level of control needs something with a bit more power and sophistication inside.

 

Can anyone explain how video corruption on FF or Rewind at speed is happening?

[shockwave199 0]

There will come a point when you stop checking every little motion event. That gets old and tired after a while. Fact is, you're now documenting what happens 99.999% of the time outside your residence- nature in motion. You have to pick your battles, and trying to win the the war over outdoor motion events is futile. You can use PIR's. But it's more work and expense and even they will fail from the extremes of outdoor weather in time. The deal is, set up the dvr for motion recording because it will help to cut down on some recording, and it will make it easier to find files in times of crisis. Don't bother with email notification for exterior cameras unless they are aimed in such a way that they are low on motion regardless, or you have an indoor camera. Turn off the little beeper in the dvr for motion. Set your masking as best you can for each camera and make sure all your critical spots are open for motion regardless of ANYTHING. Turn your sensitivity back up to reasonable levels to catch motion. Dial down sensitivity at your peril- you might miss a critical event. So bring it back up. And then....walk away and let your dvr work for you. Just let it record. It will fill up the hard drive and double back and record over old footage. It's the nature of the game- don't stress the obvious. Even if you get a 25 to 40 days of archiving, that's almost always plenty. Just keep the thing recording. I used to turn off recording during rain, wind, snow, whatever- all in the name of saving hard drive space for some inexplicable reason. You know what that got me? A missed event in a rain storm. Yes, bad stuff happens even in rain storms. So, set it and forget it. If you're not recording, you're missing opportunities. Review some files every so often to make sure all is well, and that's it. Don't pick at it. Let it work for you, false motion events and all. And hope that's ALL you'll ever get.

 

If you're getting whacked fast playback on the local dvr monitor, perhaps it's an issue. Playing back files remotely, it's not- so long as the files are playing back at normal speed correctly. Fast playback remotely can get finicky in all kinds of ways.

[AlienDroid 0]

Thanx shockwave199

 

Yeah I have come to that way of thinking and just letting the DVR work for me. I was expecting a bit too much from it, another set of eyes and the odd beep to let me know when someone is around.

 

I do actually have it running/recording 24/7 so if something happens I will hopefully have a reasonable record of it. Of course it would be good to catch someone and deal with them in the act so to speak, because if at night and in the rain the quality of image is not great with the cams I'm using.

I was going to setup email notification but there is no point with all the false alarms, but I might do that later if I install an internal cam

Last night I only had 2 false alarms. One was a spider the other a moth, but the night before with more wind speed I had around 30.

This morning when the sun came in and out and the light levels changed even with complete cloud cover it set the alarm off several times.

At least rain doesn't seem to be setting them off.

 

Playback issues;

No it's a direct HDMI connect to my TV. I haven't Networked it yet so this isn't a remote problem. Not sure why that would be an issue!

The problem is also intermittent and not always the exact same if I play back the same recording in the exact same place.

I've also just noticed the time seems stuck or flits back and forwards, then when I stop or play it skips forward. Just what you don't want when looking through recording logs!