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Auto tracking

edited September 2021 in SecuritySpy
Hi Ben,

any plans to provide auto tracking in Spy and not to rely on the camera's feature? Of course the prerequisite for this is that the camera provides PTZ.

I would be willing to pay for this as an additional smart package oder whatever it could be called..

Br
Sotto

Comments

  • Yes, I have the same question. An add on would be great. I have three NSC4A425's and currently feel limited with what I can control in a Smart Tracking mode.
    CEK
  • This would be a nice feature, but we are skeptical that such a feature could be implemented in such a way that actually works well. We haven't seen this feature implemented successfully in any camera that we have seen - the two main issues are: 1. Once motion has been detected and the camera zooms/pans to the area of motion, it is blind to everything outside this area, and 2. Whenever the camera moves (which has to be frequently to keep up with the tracking), it is blind to movement of objects in its field of view, because the whole frame is filled with the motion that the camera's movement is causing.

    The only way this could work properly is with a pair of cameras: a fixed wide-angled camera that does the motion detection, paired with a PTZ camera that is then moved based on motion detected in the fixed cameras. This could certainly work quite well, but the issue here is how may users would actually implement this in their systems - I would be worried that we would spend a lot of development time perfecting this, only for it to be used by only a tiny minority of users.
  • HI Ben,

    I understand your explanation, thanks for your detailed view - this would be the super duper implementation of the use case.
    A basic implementation would be (at least for me sufficient):
    cam is at a "home" position, if a human is entering the field of view, the cam follows.
    Once the human is out, the cam goes back to its home position!

    this how the really cheap cam here is doing auto tracking: https://www.amazon.de/JideTech-Überwachungskamera-wasserdicht-Nachtsicht-Unterstützung/dp/B092QDD21J?ref_=ast_sto_dp

    And it is sufficient to be tracking just humans, not any moving objects in general
  • Yes I think you're right that this could work sufficiently well for tracking humans - much better than trying to track any motion, where you will have frequent false-positives due to moving plans/shadows etc.
  • I have one PTZ camera tracking well but the same model PTZ will trigger and record but not track. I have checked same firmware, same set up parameters. What have I missed?
  • Hi @cek it's difficult to say - I presume you have cross-checked all relevant settings between the two cameras? I think this is probably a question for the camera manufacturer.
  • edited October 2021
    An increasing number of people seem to be doing the fixed spotter cam + PTZ using Dahua NVRs or BI. I think until recently it's been more novelty/experimentation (at our price point, not so much at the massively higher price points) but increasing knowledge is making it genuinely useful.

    We included two ethernets to a few locations during rough-in for this possibility.

    I agree w/ above that tracking humans is most important. I wouldn't mind an option for tracking animals as well. The latter kind of falls in to the entertainment realm but people will pay for that as well. :-)
  • I have downloaded the trial of this software and was hoping for this use case. I want to have a 180 camera that looks up and detects movement in the sky, then passes that info to a PTZ optical zoom camera that will zoom in and record some quality eagles and aircraft flying videos while auto tracking. Easier said than done I'm sure. Feature requests are simple to make and take no programming!

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