Blurry morning pics

[wittaj]

I do not think it is a focus issue - all that white "dusting" in the image is indicative of too much gain and NR washing out the plate. Mine did that too while trying to dial in the plates. Going to shutter priority fixed mine.

Maybe the focus number is off too, but that is readily fixed by stopping a car at the sweet spot during the day and putting the camera into B/W mode and dialing in the focus so you know what number to set it to.

But all you should see are head/tail lights and the plate - the slight light ghost trail of the lights shouldn't be there.

 

[wrybread]

Turn gain down to 30 too or use the other setting that is shutter priority at 1/2000 and that should fix it - did for mine.

Great, new night settings are attached. I just set NR down to 30. How do I set gain to 30? In the screenshot I have a range of 10 to 40 for gain. Do you set both to 30?

Turn on BLC in backlight

Awesome, done.

But all you should see are head/tail lights and the plate - the slight light ghost trail of the lights shouldn't be there.

Interesting, I wonder if that's the noise reduction. I'll post some samples after tonight.

 

[wittaj]

@wrybread - unless there was a firmware update that changed it, when you go to the mode selection under exposure, there is a shutter option and a shutter priority option - use the shutter priority option and that eliminates the gain altogether - for what we are trying to do, gain is usually bad for this application.

For BLC - go to customized and try 50.

 

[wrybread]

@wrybread - unless there was a firmware update that changed it, when you go to the mode selection under exposure, there is a shutter option and a shutter priority option - use the shutter priority option and that eliminates the gain altogether - for what we are trying to do, gain is usually bad for this application.

Aha! Found it, thanks. How's this look?

For BLC - go to customized and try 50.

For Backlight -> BLC, when I select "customized" I don't get a number range, I get a box on the camera preview as attached. Thoughts?

 

[wittaj]

@wrybread - OK - that shutter priority should fix it.

OH - try HLC instead - that is what I meant.

 

[wrybread]

OH - try HLC instead - that is what I meant.

Awesome, done.

 

[wrybread]

My night plate reads are still pretty fuzzy:



Does that image look the way people would expect from my settings?

 

[wittaj]

@wrybread - If I remember correctly, you are fairly close to that road - how much zoom do you have going on with the camera? Some people have reported focus issues greater than 80% zoom.

Based on how much "light" I can see in that photo, you may need to go to a faster shutter speed - maybe try 1/3000. All I see in my pics literally are the tail lights and plate at night - no way in the world I could make out the vehicle in mine like yours unless I could make it based on the shape of the tail lights, but we can clearly see this is a pickup truck.

I would suggest having some one stop a vehicle in about that spot tomorrow and put the camera in B/W and get the focus number for the B/W. You will want to change the speed for focus and zoom from 20 to 1 so that you know the actual number and not to the nearest 20.

The speed is how fast zoom and focus moves to your adjustments. A speed of 20 means it moves to the spot faster than at speed of 1. So at this image below, if you hit the + or - sign on the zoom or focus, the slider will jump by 20 spots. This is fine for initial setup to get it close.

If you hover the mouse over the slider, it will give you a number. That number will rounded to the nearest whole number of the speed. So if your focus is really 1507 but you have the speed at 20, it will show you a focus of 1500 and then when you try to manually set it at 1500, you will be blurry because you are off by 7 points.

The noise reduction probably needs some adjustment too or this is from substream or bitrate too low? What bitrate you running?

 

[wrybread]

Thanks for the tips, sorry it took me so long to give them a try.

And especially huge thanks for pointing out that I can adjust the focus more finely by changing the "speed" parameter in the GUI. I was able to get slightly better focus. I was pretty focused before, but now it's a notch crisper.

I haven't been able to get good results using the "shutter priority" setting at night. Even on the fastest setting (1/1,000,000) the pics are bright like this:




(And using HLC backlighting).

Going back to "manual" and a shutter of 1/10,000 gives me something that looks a bit better for ALPR:




Am I missing something with "Shutter Priority"? I wonder if it's because I have a little bit of backlighting?

I'm using minimal zoom (GUI says 260, API says 0.216306):



As far as bitrate, I'm using the Main Stream, H.264H, 1080P, 15 FPS, CBR, Reference Bitrate 1024-6912Kb/S.

 

[wittaj]

Something is off - no way you would get that bright a picture at the fastest shutter - there isn't a ton of light there correct? Were you running HLC on this one as well?

I was going to suggest that maybe your camera is stuck on on profile permanent day, but then you got that dark shot on 7/12. Snap a screenshot of your profile management.

Or I am wondering if since you are so much closer to the plate than most of us that the IR is just completely washing it out. I would say if you found the setting now that gives you that black image with a clean plate, then go with it?

 

[biggen]

I don't know why its so bright using shutter priority but the manual setting is what I would expect it to look like.

 

[samplenhold]

In case yo have not figured this out: From the Dahua Network Cam Web 3.0 man.