Rain triggering motion detection
I've got a Samsung SNO-6084R camera set up with SecuritySpy, and the motion sensing in SS is highly prone to triggering when it's raining. The Camera has a ring of IR lights around the lens for night illumination, and as a result (I think) rain appears as distinct streaks across the image. If the there is enough rain, streaks are pretty much always present, and motion triggers near constantly. This only happens at night (or much more at night) which is part of what makes me think it's the IR illumination that's causing, or at least aggravating the problem. To stop the triggers, I've had to dial the motion sensitivity down to 10, and I worry that in doing so I have defeated the desirable effects of motion sensing.
Has anyone else run into this and have any clever solutions? I could turn off the IR illumination, but then I'd lose a bunch of nigh vision that I paid extra for in this camera.
One thing I was wondering is whether installing some sort of hood might help, thereby ensuring that rain drops are some minimum distance away from the lens, and perhaps less brightly lit by the IR light ring?
Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks
Has anyone else run into this and have any clever solutions? I could turn off the IR illumination, but then I'd lose a bunch of nigh vision that I paid extra for in this camera.
One thing I was wondering is whether installing some sort of hood might help, thereby ensuring that rain drops are some minimum distance away from the lens, and perhaps less brightly lit by the IR light ring?
Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks
Comments
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A hood can help, but you'll still get some detections - extending the "Trigger Time" in the Camera setup pane to longer times can helpas well
I've read that using an IR Flood light located at least a few feet away from the camera and disabling the IR lights in the camera (still have the camera able to switch to IR mode) can help reduce the false alerts
- not sure if that would help reduce rain/snow detections as well but it might since they wouldn't be illuminated right infront of the camera - making them cause a larger motion I know the IR Flood Lights helps with reducing insect/moth false alerts - since they will bug the light, instead of the camera. -
Thanks. I'll experiment with that. Extending the trigger time didn't seem to make much difference since when it's raining consistently there is always streaking. So my initial conclusion was that I would be filtering out real triggers (like people) and not having much impact on snow and rain (yes, it snowed last night).
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I use a 1 second trigger with a detection at 35. I still do get some rain/snow false alerts at night, but it reduced them from a few hundred to maybe 30-40 - but it still detects people 100% of the time.
Next summer I'll be getting an IR Flood light and work on an even better solution. -
As Brian says, a separate IR flood light, with the camera's own LEDs disabled, is the best way to deal with this. A hood over the camera may also help somewhat, as well as increasing the trigger time setting - try 2-3 seconds.
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This is a persistent problem with outdoor cameras and SSpy. Other camera management systems manage this issue by examining number of pixels changing in motion events, modulated by the number of events in a given short period of time, and this has been covered in other threads on this forum. SSpy does not have this anti-false-alarm ability, and I would not suggest it for use in areas that have rain, fog, snow, or dust, especially with IR illumination unless you want to have a large number of false positive videos. Now that the time lapse function has been removed from 4.0, this is an even worse situation as there is no quick way to scan through a camera's history.
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It's a very difficult situation to deal with, because a small brightly-lit object (e.g. a raindrop or bug illuminated by the camera's built-in lights) moving close to the camera looks to the motion-detection algorithm very much like a more distant large object (e.g. person or car) that you do actually want to capture. SecuritySpy does have multiple measures to cut down false positive detections, though we can have another look at this specific situation to see if we can improve things in this case.
And, although the specific ability to produce timelapse movies - in the sense of being able to specify a faster playback rate than capture rate - has been removed, SecuritySpy can still capture continuously at whatever frame rate you want it to (e.g. specify 0.5fps for a capture rate of 2 seconds between frames); it's just that the movies will now play back in real-time. You can use the Browser to play them back at whatever rate you wish, and you can additionally specify a new playback frame rate for the movies when you export them from the Browser.
