Cleaning up street footage at night

[Tygunn]

We had a pack of 3 cyclists casing the neighborhood and stealing packages the other night.

My camera setup is generally focused on catching intrusion on to my property and attempts to enter my house. One of my cameras has an ir illuminator that lights up to the sidewalk pretty well.

In the following videos you can see the bikes go by at 2:38:50am:
This camera has the illuminator:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/njKSUUZ6YxM9QMMa2

This one doesn't:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/gP8eeSCYCIvuuZYI2

I have a feeling a larger IR illuminator would just wash out the foreground. Anyone have any thoughts on the best way to light up the street?

Maybe another couple larger emitters mounted in the tree nearest the road?

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[Parley]

What cameras are those?

 

[Tygunn]

Starlight IPC-HDW5231R-Zs.

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[giel]

I think the settings can be tweaked a lot, too. Probably increasing minimum shutter speed, increasing bitrate, increasing gain a little, probably decreasing noise reduction. You'll get way less of a ghosting/trailing effect and the footage will be much more useful.

 

[bigredfish]

Maybe another couple larger emitters mounted in the tree nearest the road?

Along with some setting tweaking as mentioned, that tree and a good IR illuminator was my first thought. That and more zoom, even to get good ID at your car/mailbox. I'd zoom both of those more and hang a wider angle Overview cam for the whole scene out front.

 

[Tygunn]

I think the settings can be tweaked a lot, too. Probably increasing minimum shutter speed, increasing bitrate, increasing gain a little, probably decreasing noise reduction. You'll get way less of a ghosting/trailing effect and the footage will be much more useful.

I've set up a night profile with manual exposure 0-10 msec. I have also bumped the bit rate to 8096 from 4096. We will see if that makes things clearer.



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[Tygunn]

Along with some setting tweaking as mentioned, that tree and a good IR illuminator was my first thought. That and more zoom, even to get good ID at your car/mailbox. I'd zoom both of those more and hang a wider angle Overview cam for the whole scene out front.

I used to have the camera at the driveway zoomed on my mailbox but now that I've got a heavy duty locking box I've zoomed it out some.

I have 2 other cameras at the front that give me really good coverage of the potential approaches up to my house.

I think illuminators on the tree will be my plan. I ultimately need to get power up there at some point so I can power my Christmas lights.

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[Tygunn]

Tweaked the cameras to bump up the gain and raise the shutter speed in the night profile. I also raised the data rate to 8192 with a variable bit rate encoder.

The ghosting is significantly improved and quality for the camera with an external illulimator is improved.

Just in time too, I caught footage of a car of transients pull up in front of the house late last night. One of them got out of the car and took a gas can off frame. I guess now I know how the people living in cars can afford gas -- they can't. The two people the pile of stuff in the back seat put up "privacy screens" on the rear windows and enjoyed some private time while their buddy siphoned gas.

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[Parley]

What did you raise the shutter speed to at night? Looks like you are making good progress.

 

[Tygunn]

What did you raise the shutter speed to at night? Looks like you are making good progress.

I used the shutter speed range. 1/100sec seems to work well for pedestrian traffic. Cars are still a smear of course. I will see if more illuminators near the street let me get some more out of that.

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[aristobrat]

How far is it from the camera to the street?

 

[Tygunn]

How far is it from the camera to the street?

Camera to the edge of street is 26'.
Tree to the edge of the street is 8'.

I'm assuming its probably unreasonable to get clear shots of moving cars at night (primarily for vehicle type ID; I know the license plate is a whole other story).

 

[Cam_curious]

I am wondering about mounting a camera under my mailbox. It would have a very good shot up the street.
A dome might be too conspicuous and invite vandalism but some sort of pinhole camera might do the trick.

 

[Tygunn]

I am wondering about mounting a camera under my mailbox. It would have a very good shot up the street.
A dome might be too conspicuous and invite vandalism but some sort of pinhole camera might do the trick.

I've considered that as well, but I feel like the mailbox being right by the sidewalk would invite someone to kick it or otherwise damage it.
A pinhole is going to be tough as you're not going to get an amazing picture at night or day due to the tiny lens. Though worth experimenting.

On the tree in the photo above it would be pretty trivial to mount a camera at head height in a fake birdhouse. With the dahua turrets, for example, I'd just expose the camera lens and not the IR illuminators (otherwise it would look like some kind of evil bird was in the birdhouse at night).
I've also been tempted to get a shot down the street with a turret mounted in the bush to the right of the photo. Cars park along my side of the street often so its not really the best option.

 

[Tygunn]

I've been running the new settings for a while, and I've also upgraded my IR illuminator.
I've got a 15 LED illuminator now: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075MW6VLT/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It definitely lights up across the street much better than the old one did. In fact, it also casts a reasonable amount of light onto the driveway area.

Here's an example of someone walking by; this is the camera closest to the illuminator so it is nice and clear.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/hyhquxe0ObX1SEiZ2

Here's an example of someone walking by; you can see the shadow cast by the tree in the IR light from the illuminator off to the far right.
The footage here is considerably grainier. The camera is clearly putting a lot more effort into pulling something out of what is clearly a darker scene:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/0Fa9EjEzHTMVvCAu2
I think I'll get another one of these illuminators and mount it to point down the driveway and onto the street. That should improve things for this camera.

I'll have to temporarily mount an illuminator into the tree and see if I can pull some more detail out of passing cars. Although in the first camera I can get an idea of what kind of car it is, I won't get much more than that in the night footage.

Daytime footage is of course perfectly fine. I run 1/500 sec shutter speed and can stop moving cars and see them clearly, as well as some details of the people in them.

The only downside to running a much higher frame rate is that instead of getting ~1 month of back footage I get ~1 week of back footage.
I'm recording to both a Dahua NVR and a BlueIris PC. The NVR has a 4TB WD Purple and the Blue Iris has a 4TB WD Purple and another regular 3TB drive which is for the older footage.
I'm getting about 1 week on the Dahua NVR of 24/7 recording and 1.5 weeks on the Blue Iris system (it also records some old Samsung wifi cams and an old Hikvision).

I think I'll take the 4TB from my Blue Iris computer and put it into the Dahue NVR, and then get an 8 or 10 TB for the Blue Iris computer. I'd prefer a couple weeks of 24/7 footage.

 

[aristobrat]

I see where you bumped your shutter speed up, but not where you raised your frame rate? Did upping the shutter speed automatically increase the frame rate?

 

[Tygunn]

I see where you bumped your shutter speed up, but not where you raised your frame rate? Did upping the shutter speed automatically increase the frame rate?

I bumped up the max bit rate to 8192; the FPS is still at 25 as it was before:


Daytime profile:


Nightime profile:



Windows task manager reports BI using ~ 35-50 Mbps network traffic.
I run about 43% CPU to BI on an i5-4690K @ 3.5 GHz.

 

[TaGosa]

I had same issue. I did following to reduce the ghosting to minimum. You should read more about 3DNR and WDR, you will understand why the cycle person appear ghostly.

Backlight, WDR=15
Exposure Outdoor, Mode = Auto, 3DNR=On, Grade=5.

Also, in my experience, visible light is better than IR. Small amount of visible light (couple of watt of LED, even solar LEDs) helps. The night video is cleaner. The artifact you see (ghost cycle rider) is not there. Gas thieves will not come near, because of the light. Preventing crime is the goal, and visible light goes a long way to prevent it. A motion detected light is even better (the one which is dim by default, but becomes brighter on motion detection).

Hope this helps.

 

[Tygunn]

I had same issue. I did following to reduce the ghosting to minimum. You should read more about 3DNR and WDR, you will understand why the cycle person appear ghostly.

Backlight, WDR=15
Exposure Outdoor, Mode = Auto, 3DNR=On, Grade=5.

Also, in my experience, visible light is better than IR. Small amount of visible light (couple of watt of LED, even solar LEDs) helps. The night video is cleaner. The artifact you see (ghost cycle rider) is not there. Gas thieves will not come near, because of the light. Preventing crime is the goal, and visible light goes a long way to prevent it. A motion detected light is even better (the one which is dim by default, but becomes brighter on motion detection).

Hope this helps.

It looks like the the main difference in your settings is reducing the grade of the noise reduction. I'll have to give that a shot.

I've got a decent amount of visible light at the important spots in front of the house where I really care to see things clearly. The stuff at the street is dark because the street lights are pretty dim and spaced far apart. I suppose I could light the street, but in some respects I kinda like seeing some interesting activity. Haha.

 

[TaGosa]

any luck with settings.