Bugs & Birds trigger Motion - how to stop?

I have cameras outside and when small flies go by the lens or when birds fly through the space - motion is triggered.

birds... they never take up much of the visual area and they fly quickly, rarely landing.
-- any way to tweak detection so that fast moving objects of 'less than N pixels' is not counted as motion? (or is this a feature request?)

bugs... they often land on the lens. thus, contrast is high and the # of pixels is large'ish.
-- any thoughts on how to avoid this issue?

thx!

There's plenty of info on this. Study up on using the size/contrast sliders under triggers. There's also already a pixel length feature if you look at options or the help file. Finally, you can use zone triggering to help achieve what you're looking for in some cases. Will take some reading I'm afraid. As for bugs on the lens, etc., your best bet is prevention--use equipment with separate IR lighting or at least with IR lights not so close to the lens. You could also spray the area around the camera with some sort of repellent, but that may be hit or miss with flying bugs. Good luck.

This part of BI seems to be more like art than science.

For the flying birds, I agree with @bleepsilver ... play around with the minimum size to detect an object slider, and if they're flying fast enough, maybe the "wait until trigger" delay.

For the bugs coming up to the lens, maybe the "reset scene if object is bigger than %" option could help. Zone crossing would probably help here too, but that can open up another can of worms (depending on how motion you want to record normally crosses in front of your camera).

These cameras are in walled (on left/right) entryways. Camera 1 is 4' off the ground (Capture.jpg), off-center, directly aiming at down the entry. Camera 2 (Capture2.jpg) is centered above the door aiming downward. The lower one has issues with light glare for the first half of the day so bright light is a huge issue. Sometimes the glare is so bad, you cannot see anything but light in the archway - but that glare is never a problem with Camera 2 because the angle.

I hadnt been using zones but I just set them up as that might help solve some of the bird problem. And maybe the bugs too, since they will be too small (too far from the camera) in Zone A.

For the zone, I divided them about mid-way on the entry concrete pad... thus, an object would need to be tall enough to fill part of the archway, then cross onto the walled area.

I have the object size set to 515 and 100 pixel crossing, with contrast very low due to the massive lighting issues and changes through out the day.

Thoughts on this?

Looks like you're on the right track--you may need to tweak settings after you get some triggers. Keep in mind, 100 pixels is a very short distance in the field of view. There's a post somewhere here graphically illustrating rough pixel distances. Do you mean your 'Object size exceeds 515?' If so, I believe that scale is designed to be set between .1 - 100 percent. There's conflicting understanding about this setting, but I take it to mean that if an object's size exceeds say a setting of 50 percent of the area you've marked for triggers, the motion detection will reset and not alert. This can be useful for lighting changes that set off most of a zone. So the trick is to create a zone or zones much bigger than say the size of a target you want to alert on (animals, humans) and then figure the percentage that would be too large to be human. In that doorway for example with the lighting problem, Make a large zone that a big person can only fill 40 percent of the zone upon detection (set a quick make time of less than half a second) and then set object size exceeds 50 percent. In theory, big lighting changes will trigger 50 percent or more of the zone and simply reset your motion detection. This will require experimentation, especially if you have multiple zones with pass through rules like 'target 1 must either go from zone A to zone B or vice versa' in order to alert (A-B). Or only from zone A to B (A>B). Or must cross A & B before C (AB>C). Fortunately you can set these up and go try them out since they're at your front door. Also, be sure to do the same at night. One thing I can't predict in that bright light is how a person's shadow when entering the field of view is going to affect zone triggering...you'll just have to play with it. You can also have separate settings for the camera with the light problem by assigning each set of settings to a different profile. One profile to be very strict about what gets triggered during the lighting problem and another profile when the light isn't a problem and you can relax your settings with say one zone. If you do this, you can set the cameras schedule independent of your other cameras in camera options. Good luck!