Best Blue Iris setting for less false alerts due to windy cloud shadows?

[erkme73]

Just wanted to add a suggestion... Since much of what you do to decrease sensitivity of major light/shadow changes during windy days may also desensitize legitimate triggers, you may want to implement the changes on a separate profile. So, for example, I have decreased sensitivity and increased object size to that I get very few triggers, but I made those changes on a profile I call "Windy/Rainy". When it's a particularly windy day, I'll click the windy profile. 8 hours later, when the profile expires, the sensitivity returns to default.

It's not as good as have a single setting that works for all conditions, but it is a good workaround that doesn't rely on my memory to return it back to normal.

 

[TheWhiteKnight]

Add me to the list. I've mostly used 10% for object size exceeds with an object travels setting of 30 pixels and cancel shadows enabled. I feel like the pixel travel might be triggering the light changes before the object size can reset it so I bumped it up from 15 to 30 which still might be really low. I really hope they find a solution to this. I'm getting false alarms all day long and it interrupts everything. Really my only gripe with BI but I don't think anyone has a perfect solution for it yet.

 

[fenderman]

Add me to the list. I've mostly used 10% for object size exceeds with an object travels setting of 30 pixels and cancel shadows enabled. I feel like the pixel travel might be triggering the light changes before the object size can reset it so I bumped it up from 15 to 30 which still might be really low. I really hope they find a solution to this. I'm getting false alarms all day long and it interrupts everything. Really my only gripe with BI but I don't think anyone has a perfect solution for it yet.

No pixel based motion will be 100 percent. You can get 99 percent accuracy if you spend the time to actually learn the features and function of blue iris motion detection including zone crossing/make times and alert settings..its light years ahead of any NVR/camera....these are settings that cannot be implemented for you as they change from camera to camera and location to location...with your 10 percent setting for example you will miss important footage..I would suggest you set it to continuous record and use motion detection for alerts only if you wish to keep it that way.

 

[TheWhiteKnight]

Its been working fine to detect anything else while at 10% thus far.. Is my pixel travel too low?

I can't do continuous recording at the moment so as not to wear out the drive. I'm using a PC and don't have a surveillance rated drive installed currently. Continuous recording seems more viable but at the end of the day alerts will always be needed. I personally understand the features but haven't yet figured out the best combination of settings to avoid these false positives while still catching the true positives.

The only great thing is not having to deal with it at night when most crimes occur and when the good old neighborhood spider and moth start the night shift!

 

[aristobrat]

My experience with my Dahua Starlight turrets was that their IVS was *excellent* at tuning out light changes. Cloudy windy days rarely triggered alerts. Porch/garage lights turning on/off at night never triggered alerts. All the while, “important footage” was never missed. This didn’t require the BI legwork of “learning the function and features”, followed by several hours of trials and errors.

I love BI for all things except this. And the lack of BI owners jumping in to talk about the “general things” they did to successfully tune their BI to ignore lighting changes (without losing motion events) makes me think very few BI owners have figured this out.

Personally, my hope is that Ken is able to make BI subscribe to Dahua camera events (like he has with Hikvision camera events). BI being able to record when IVS fires on my Dahua cameras would be the best of both worlds for me.

 

[fenderman]

My experience with my Dahua Starlight turrets was that their IVS was *excellent* at tuning out light changes. Cloudy windy days rarely triggered alerts. Porch/garage lights turning on/off at night never triggered alerts. All the while, “important footage” was never missed. This didn’t require the BI legwork of “learning the function and features”, followed by several hours of trials and errors.

I love BI for all things except this. And the lack of BI owners jumping in to talk about the “general things” they did to successfully tune their BI to ignore lighting changes (without losing motion events) makes me think very few BI owners have figured this out.

Personally, my hope is that Ken is able to make BI subscribe to Dahua camera events (like he has with Hikvision camera events). BI being able to record when IVS fires on my Dahua cameras would be the best of both worlds for me.

blue iris zone crossing is way better that dahua ivs will ever be...all you need to do is learn how to use it....

 

[fenderman]

Its been working fine to detect anything else while at 10% thus far.. Is my pixel travel too low?

I can't do continuous recording at the moment so as not to wear out the drive. I'm using a PC and don't have a surveillance rated drive installed currently. Continuous recording seems more viable but at the end of the day alerts will always be needed. I personally understand the features but haven't yet figured out the best combination of settings to avoid these false positives while still catching the true positives.

The only great thing is not having to deal with it at night when most crimes occur and when the good old neighborhood spider and moth start the night shift!

you will not "wear out" a non surveillance drive...
if you are not continuously recording, you have no idea what you missed.
You need to play with the features and test...
if you are not willing to do so, installing PIR sensors and or move up to very expensive vms with true analytics...

 

[aristobrat]

blue iris zone crossing is way better that dahua ivs will ever be...all you need to do is learn how to use it....

When there’s a 27-post-long thread made from people trying to learn how to use a product, and none of them have had luck, and nobody “with experience” has come along to share the generalities of how they got it to work on their system, then there’s a problem, and IMO, it’s not with the people.

There are a lot of people on the forum here who do know BI enough to do some pretty great things with it. And between the lot of them, someone is always sharing their knowledge on other BI issues/config options. But when it comes to this particular issue, there’s basically nothing shared. Crickets. Notta. Which really makes it seems like nobody’s actually got BI tuned to handle this situation great, so everyone’s keeping their mouths shut. Or if they have figured it out, someone has sworn them to secrecy.

For crap’s sake, there’s a HOWTO on how to setup STUNNEL being shared on the forums here. Tuning out light changes shouldn’t be more mysterious or complex than that.

Seriously, I can do a forum search here on just about any other BI topic and find YEARS of threads with all sorts of advice and knowledge transfer. But when it comes to tuning for light changes (without also missing motion), nothing. To your point, the actual solution for everyone’s going to be specific based on their cameras and views. But the general troubleshooting of how to tackle the issue isn’t going to be.

 

[fenderman]

When there’s a 27-post-long thread made from people trying to learn how to use a product, and none of them have had luck, and nobody “with experience” has come along to share the generalities of how they got it to work on their system, then there’s a problem, and IMO, it’s not with the people.

There are a lot of people on the forum here who do know BI enough to do some pretty great things with it. And between the lot of them, someone is always sharing their knowledge on other BI issues/config options. But when it comes to this particular issue, there’s basically nothing shared. Crickets. Notta. Which really makes it seems like nobody’s actually got BI tuned to handle this situation great, so everyone’s keeping their mouths shut. Or if they have figured it out, someone has sworn them to secrecy.

For crap’s sake, there’s a HOWTO on how to settle STUNNEL being shared on the forums here. Tuning out light changes shouldn’t be more mysterious or complex than that.

Seriously, I can do a forum search here on just about any other BI topic and find YEARS of threads with all sorts of advice and knowledge transfer. But when it comes to tuning for light changes (without also missing motion), nothing. To your point, the actual solution for everyone’s going to be specific based on their cameras and views. But the general troubleshooting of how to tackle the issue isn’t going to be.

Most of them are lazy wont read the help file and wont test...there is no automatic way of doing it.....there are many many posts where I as well as others explain how to do this..including the proper way to setup zone crossing (overlapping), properly using object detection, as well as not using hotspot and setting make times above 0.7 seconds....you are not search properly..most of this is basic common sense - that is lacking...
The beauty of blue iris is that it has tons of options, to utilize them you have to spend time reading...if you just want basics, its very easy...if you want advanced features you will need to work for them...There is no cheap software that provides for advanced analytics - that costs thousands of dollars. Understand that features like zone crossing and this new level of object detection have only been around for a bit over a year or so...so there wont be as many threads...even with the old basic algorithms it was easy to eliminate false alerts by using common sense.

 

[TheWhiteKnight]

"A normal PC hard drive will most likely burn out within 6-8 months from the strain of recording several video feeds 24/7." So this statement isn't true and the western digital specific drives are for what then?

 

[fenderman]

"A normal PC hard drive will most likely burn out within 6-8 months from the strain of recording several video feeds 24/7." So this statement isn't true and the western digital specific drives are for what then?

it is a false statement...the purple drives handle multiple video streams better with respect to recording and playback...I have over 20+ blue iris pc's most of them record to the OEM drive that is in the system with an SSD as the boot drive. They have been running for years....
if you are buying new, then purple is ideal...

 

[TheWhiteKnight]

Good to know thank you. I read that at Security-Camera-Warehouse and had took their word for it, glad I asked!

 

[fenderman]

Good to know thank you. I read that at Security-Camera-Warehouse and had took their word for it, glad I asked!

lol, they are idiots.

 

[maximeeso]

This is your typical afternoon alert for my driveway cam thanks to being backed up to the woods.

What can be done outside of the obvious which is excluding the whole concrete driveway (which I don't want to do)

 

[maximeeso]

I can probably fix the issue in my previous post by decreasing the sensitivity of the contrast/size, but this one is less obvious:

 

[anijet]

A combination of multiple zones, zone crossing and object travels will eliminate most of your shadow triggers while triggering on what you want. The clouds changing brightness is more difficult but reducing contrast will help. I would try unchecking high definition.

 

[Starman66]

When there’s a 27-post-long thread made from people trying to learn how to use a product, and none of them have had luck, and nobody “with experience” has come along to share the generalities of how they got it to work on their system, then there’s a problem, and IMO, it’s not with the people.

There are a lot of people on the forum here who do know BI enough to do some pretty great things with it. And between the lot of them, someone is always sharing their knowledge on other BI issues/config options. But when it comes to this particular issue, there’s basically nothing shared. Crickets. Notta. Which really makes it seems like nobody’s actually got BI tuned to handle this situation great, so everyone’s keeping their mouths shut. Or if they have figured it out, someone has sworn them to secrecy.

For crap’s sake, there’s a HOWTO on how to setup STUNNEL being shared on the forums here. Tuning out light changes shouldn’t be more mysterious or complex than that.

Seriously, I can do a forum search here on just about any other BI topic and find YEARS of threads with all sorts of advice and knowledge transfer. But when it comes to tuning for light changes (without also missing motion), nothing. To your point, the actual solution for everyone’s going to be specific based on their cameras and views. But the general troubleshooting of how to tackle the issue isn’t going to be.

I'll add my name to the list of "just dealing with it". I am now continuously recording but have hundreds of false alarms from palm tree shadows. I have tried using the crossing zones and tweaked/tested for hours. Problem with palm fronds is they have giant swings that can travel from frame edges and the shadows change position throughout the day. As I stated in an earlier post, the Cancel Shadow feature used to work beautifully but not anymore

 

[Dasstrum]

"A normal PC hard drive will most likely burn out within 6-8 months from the strain of recording several video feeds 24/7." So this statement isn't true and the western digital specific drives are for what then?

Not sure where you are getting your information from. Western Digital Purple drives are made for surveillance systems that record 24/7. They also have a 3 year warranty on that drive. If you go buy some budget $40 Hitachi or "Ultrastar" drive that is made for a senior citizen checking their email once every Friday night then yeah... those drives aren't designed for that

 

[jrf]

I'll add myself to the list. While I realize there are lots of scenarios there has to be some general guidelines. Since we are all using basically the same size/type cameras and trying to detect pretty much the same things.

 

[piconut]

Me too. I would like more info on how best to use the "object detection" settings. I mainly just use the zones setting and adjust the sensitivity and make time, but I get lots and lots of short clips from the outside cameras each day. A typical day of just shadows from the trees and not much wind and I get 50 to 100 short clips recorded from each camera. I've got the disk space but I don't think I'm using BI as efficiently as possible. I have tweaked my sensitivity settings to be fairly sensitive in order not to miss any motion of people. Certainly not complaining here, but just asking for help and guidance on how other people have their systems set to reduce the overall number of false positives.