How to deal with shadows of trees in the wind

[raydude]

I have a 4K camera facing the front of my house. It works so well that it detects cars a block away.

However, when the sun starts going down... The wind causes trees to move, casting moving shadows...

I've tried changing the percentage of blend. That didn't seem to help enough.

I could make it less sensitive, but i don't want to. I get pedestrians, bicycles. Man it's cool.

Is there a strategy for ignoring shadows?

[fontiano]

It is a problem that also affects my environment. To solve the annoyance I am writing some code to integrate with ZM Event Server which analyzes the videos in search of people and / or objects and then according to certain rules sends me a notification on Telegram.

In this way I do not receive notifications regarding shadows of objects or trees even if the "useless" videos remain in the database of the recordings.

[gruiarew]

Fixed that by creating another zone. I believe was inclusive. It will record images only if it detects movement in another zone. This is how I fixed the bush in front of my house as when was windy was always filling up disk space with his "dance".

HTH

[winstontj]

Seems like there are lots of people in similar situations. I would like to explore using GPU and some open-AI engines to identify things --if I don't park my car in the same exact spot in the driveway... Or if she parks on "my side" or I park on "her side"... She's got a SUV and I've got a sedan --the windshields are at different angles and therefore reflect differently. Yes... Literally the clouds passing overhead cause events to happen.

I have not done any work on this but would very soon like to start exploring the ability to identify objects (cars, people, trees, shadows from trees based on the time of year and the angle of the sun)... And create moving or floating zones around identified objects.

I'd be willing to pay or post a bounty to start a project like this however I have a feeling that what I want will only happen through hours and hours of blood, sweat and tears (If I could afford to post a bounty that large, I'd hire a crew to write custom code that I want). I want the zone to change dynamically around the maple tree in my front yard. I want to integrate my sprinkler system so every morning I don't have 45-minutes of event recording during lawn watering. I want to be able to park my car in the driveway --and I want ZM to then identify that it's me, my car, my license plate --and then follow the sun/clouds/shadows with appropriate zones.

[fontiano]

there is already a system that does what you need and integrates with zoneminder:

https://zmeventnotification.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It analyzes and recognizes faces, plates and objects and can instantly notify you of the type of object detected

The only problem I encountered using this system is that it only analyzes images based on the alarm score (in bestmatch mode once the highest scoring frame has been analyzed it stops analyzing the remaining lower scoring frames) and it is difficult (for me) to be adjusted in outdoor environments where various objects can generate high-scoring alarm frames and "overhang" the frame you would like to be analyzed.

I have managed to make it work well in environments where the objects / people triggering the alarm occupy a large part of the image. Otherwise you would have to create a lot of small zones and play with the scores but, as mentioned above, I never managed to get the desired results (especially at night due to the car headlights)

In a few weeks I will share the code I am testing to analyze the events after the event is over (yolov5 + cuda and telegram notifications), slower (30 to 60 seconds of delay in notifications), more resource-hungry but much more accurate.