S3 animal detection

[tigerwillow1]

There have been posts about the new S3 series animal detection in unrelated threads. I'm hoping to pull it into its own thread. There have been multiple reports of how well the animal detection is working. So far I'm finding pretty much the opposite. For testing I've got an older 5442 and new 541R turret mounted side-by-side, both 6mm fixed focal length. The 5442 is running early firmware, before human/vehicle detection. I'm using IVS tripwires on both and the 541R's IVS sensitivity is set to 10.. All of the sightings so far have been with the cameras in B/W mode, and I wouldn't assume color mode results are necessarily the same.

Over 2 days, the 5442 with dumb IVS triggered on 8 animals the 541R-S3 did not detect, and the 541R-S3 triggered on 2 animals the 5442 did not detect. Curiously, there was no single animal that triggered both cameras. The 2 cases where the 541R triggered and the 5442 missed had the animal fairly close to the cameras, and at the bottom edge of the FOV. (The triggers were for 3 raccoons, 3 young foxes, 2 adult foxes, and 2 cats).

The S3 clearly does better with low light sensitivity. At the fringes it shows an identifiable image where the older 5442 shows an unrecognizable blob. Here are a couple of cropped comparison pairs, where the S3 did not detect but has a clearer image.

 

[Iemand91]

What's your IVS sensitivity? Default is 6 and on mine that seemed to little. I have it on 10 now and it triggers fine (as far as I know).
At one location I have a S3 along with an older 5231 for the single reason the 5231 triggered on animals while the S3 didn't.
So far on cats and birds. We haven't had marters yet the last couple of days so I can't verify on that.

Now, with this new firmware; the 5231 misses more animals than the S3.

 

[tigerwillow1]

What's your IVS sensitivity?

I have it set to 10. I should have mentioned that. Will add it to the first post.

 

[105437]

I have it set to 10. I should have mentioned that. Will add it to the first post.

For animals, I'm using intrusion (appear/cross) with setting of 6 and it's capturing animals consistently.

 

[tigerwillow1]

Here's a pretty obvious daytime miss for animal detection. The deer ran through pretty fast, and my best guess is that it was gone before the camera had a chance to decide if it was an animal. The dumb IVS camera triggered on it, or I wouldn't have known it happened. After running the S3 for several weeks it's looking like the animal detection has about a 75% hit rate during the day, and under 50% at night. I'm getting a lot of false animal triggers with the S3 camera from shadows, trees, shrubs, and tall grass. I caught a Dahua video from another thread that make it sound like I can train the camera to reject those things. Will give it a try.

 

[wittaj]

Between the speed and the color, I can see how that could have missed.

I am sure you have done it, but have you dialed it in to your field of view with contrast like 8 above brightness?

 

[tigerwillow1]

There were frames with better contrast...


I did not have the contrast setting increased and will bump it up. In the S3 feature video here Latest features in WizMind-S (5442-S3) cams - new video from Dahua I cannot find the "Search" page he's using in the video at 0:59. Either I can't find it or it's not in my firmware. The video highlighted another IVS feature called Long Distance Mode. I found that and will see if it changes anything.

 

[105437]

There were frames with better contrast...
View attachment 199049

I did not have the contrast setting increased and will bump it up. In the S3 feature video here Latest features in WizMind-S (5442-S3) cams - new video from Dahua I cannot find the "Search" page he's using in the video at 0:59. Either I can't find it or it's not in my firmware. The video highlighted another IVS feature called Long Distance Mode. I found that and will see if it changes anything.

Do you also have an intrusion box defined?

 

[tigerwillow1]

Do you also have an intrusion box defined?

I did for a while then shut it off because of too many false alerts. Things like a rock "appearing". Using only tripwire now. I didn't sense that intrusion was any better than tripwire.

 

[StevenFromTexas]

I have animal intrusion set up on five IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 cameras right now and next week will be replacing another camera with the IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 model and also activating the animal intrusion feature on that one. The feature is working flawlessly as best I can tell on the cameras that have that feature. I am picking up dogs, cats, foxes, opossums, and doves. Andy is causing me to spend a lot of money replacing cameras to get that animal intrusion feature.

Here are screenshots of my settings on one of the IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 cameras using the animal intrusion feature:

 

[105437]

I have animal intrusion set up on five IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 cameras right now and next week will be replacing another camera with the IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 model and also activating the animal intrusion feature on that one. The feature is working flawlessly as best I can tell on the cameras that have that feature. I am picking up dogs, cats, foxes, opossums, and doves. Andy is causing me to spend a lot of money replacing cameras to get that animal intrusion feature.

Here are screenshots of my setting on one the the IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 using the animal intrusion feature:

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Exactly the same settings I use for detecting animals with an intrusion box. Works exceptionally well for me.

 

[StevenFromTexas]

Here are three random pictures after being alerted to animal intrusion; the first two pictures are bird intrusions and the third picture is a cat intrusion:







While I haven't included any night time pictures, the animal intrusion feature works impressively at night.

 

[tigerwillow1]

Here are screenshots of my settings on one of the IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 cameras using the animal intrusion feature:

Are you recording 24x7 on the SD card? That's what I think I'm seeing. You're also using accu-pick. When I had that enabled the camera hardly detected animals at all. And I think I see that dumb motion detection is enabled. That will pick up anything at all, but not useful for me because of too many false alerts. The one thing I'll say for the animal detection is it's outstanding picking up birds hopping and walking on the ground. I'm impressed with that. A fox, cat, etc. can walk right through an IVS line with no trip, but when a small bird goes hopping through the camera nails it.

I'm wondering now if I should try dumb motion detection in some parts of the frame? I try that from time to time but end up disabling it because of the false alerts from blowing tree limb shadows and blowing grass.

 

[bigredfish]

IVS and MetaData running simultaneous?????

Is that only becasue AcuPick is enabled??

 

[StevenFromTexas]

Are you recording 24x7 on the SD card? That's what I think I'm seeing. You're also using accu-pick. When I had that enabled the camera hardly detected animals at all. And I think I see that dumb motion detection is enabled. That will pick up anything at all, but not useful for me because of too many false alerts. The one thing I'll say for the animal detection is it's outstanding picking up birds hopping and walking on the ground. I'm impressed with that. A fox, cat, etc. can walk right through an IVS line with no trip, but when a small bird goes hopping through the camera nails it.

I'm wondering now if I should try dumb motion detection in some parts of the frame? I try that from time to time but end up disabling it because of the false alerts from blowing tree limb shadows and blowing grass.

I don't use SD cards in any of my sixteen cameras; my belief is heat would fry those things pretty quick on outside cameras. All of my cameras are hooked up to an NVR. I use both a monitor connected to the NVR and also Internet Explorer on a Windows 10 computer.

The cameras that I have animal detection activated are doing an outstanding job picking up, to the best of my observations, every dog, cat, opossum, fox, dove, bluejay, etc. twenty-four hours a day. I believe there are ways to decrease the number of birds from activating animal detection, but I haven't paid attention to those posts on this website. It won't be too long before a cat or fox catches one of those birds on the ground at my house. Stay tuned.

 

[Mike A.]

The one thing I'll say for the animal detection is it's outstanding picking up birds hopping and walking on the ground. I'm impressed with that. A fox, cat, etc. can walk right through an IVS line with no trip, but when a small bird goes hopping through the camera nails it.

I know that I've mentioned that same thing before for the old cams/ filters. I don't know what it is about those birds but it's always picked those up great for whatever reason. As you say, my cat or a fox can walk through and nothing. Those dark starlings or whatever they are that hop around the yard, every time. Must be something about the training done.

 

[tigerwillow1]

I don't use SD cards in any of my sixteen cameras;

OK, I see now I mistook 24x7 motion detection enable for local record. After a lot of years on the old UI I'm having a hard time adapting to the new one.

 

[StevenFromTexas]

IVS and MetaData running simultaneous?????

Is that only becasue AcuPick is enabled??

Yes. AcuPick was enabled by default when I went to that screen on each camera. IVS and Video Metadata were enabled by default. I didn't mess with AcuPick any further.

 

[tigerwillow1]

I read through the release notes to see that I have the latest firmware version Version 3.142.0000000.0.R, and gleaned a couple of other tidbits:

• With AccuPick on, vehicle and person attributes are determined.
• With AccuPick, animal type is detected.

Just a guess, maybe there's less CPU horsepower available for detection when AccuPick is on?

 

[StevenFromTexas]

One of the IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 cameras I use for the alley has much less traffic of any kind, so I use it for Human, Motor Vehicle, and Animal detection. The two screens that are different than the post I made earlier with pictures of the settings are shown below:





These IPC-T54IR-ZEB-S3 cameras fall into the Home Run with Bases Loaded category.