All, I went out in the rain last night to test the latest firmware and have included a 14.5 min video below. Timestamps for ease of viewing are below.
Long story short:
Findings
- SMD in my testing both day & night has been ‘improved’ since 8/14 BUTas @looney2ns and I agree, still has issues in identifying incorrect targets such as animals as humans (noted this to @EMPIRETECANDY last night). Therefore SMD still needs work so have sent feedback and video to Dahua in hopes to get this included in the September security baseline they are working on.
- With regards to SMD sensitivity, there are some important takeaways here to dialing in your SMD targets for performance even while awaiting the next changes. I'll try not to lose people here as I explain what I've seen with SMD across these cameras. Specifically, sensitivity is usually understood as the higher the sensitivity, the more sensitive a given area is to an input or in this case a target BUT in the SMD implementation it appears that Dahua has taken Sensitivity as you would expect it to be implemented and combined this with 'threshold'. Take a look at regular Motion Detection settings and you will see it clearly has both Sensitivity & Threshold which are critical to any form of motion based capture. However, In SMD (although this is an effective add-on to regular Motion Detection) it is the threshold that it would appear the algorithm is using and biasing to spot targets rather than true sensitivity (as described). This means to enable more accurate captures or response from SMD we have to adjust our understanding and expectations of it a little. Specifically this means flipping the understanding so that setting to low 'sensitivity' (actually threshold) means it will trigger / find what the cam see's as targets more frequently than high sensitivity (again actually threshold) which would result in less target acquisition or a more conservative approach to identifying then tracking a target through FOV. I saw this in my testing and as I felt this was important, wanted to mention it here as it does change the way you approach SMD currently. Take a look at section 6:00 of the video and see for yourself the difference in continued target acquisition of SMD (green box) in Low vs Med & High especially when comparing to video as seen in 11:36. Now with highly defined targets, close to camera this makes little difference but for continued identification across further distance or as a target moves further away this becomes critically important to ensuring you continuously identify that target. Hope that made sense.
- IVS (for those that saw issues) is working fine in this release (please see the IVS section for tripwire testing) and responsiveness to target has been improved
- SmartIR there were barely any changes on this FW. Due to this, although SmartIR was much improved in 8/14, as I noted this primarily impacts face on installations which for most people may not give them what they need as generally installing these slightly higher around 6.5 to 7.5 ft. Therefore have again raised this to Dahua to fix IR response and strength for those situations where the target may be center of camera but at an angle other than face on
Therefore recommendation for now would be to use this as its the best FW so far
BUT and I do stress
BUT, there is still work needed here to get this working as expected and for that both Dahua & Andy are engaged, THANK YOU to them. I will look at the next FW once made available in September.
Video Timestamps
- 00:28 - SmartIR Testing
- 06:00 - SMD & IVS Testing
- 11:28 - SMD Only Testing
- 12:46 - SMD & IVS Full Color Test
HTH, let me know with any questions as always
