How can I improve on this facial image?

Ajpepe72

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Had a guy wonder onto our drive at 11pm last night.
I think he was confused as wonders off drive then up and down road.
This camera is left in colour mode as the image is good as there is a streetlight outside drive and lights either side of front door (where camera is mounted)
Anyone coming up to front door is easily recognisable but just venturing part way onto driveway like this guy it’s not clear at all so just looking for advise.. switch to black and white mode,small led floodlight concentrated on that area of driveway ?
 

mat200

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Hi Ajpepe72,

You can try to zoom in more to get more pixels on target.

One thing which is useful is to actually have 2 cameras covering the driveway, one covering a wider view of the cars and one covering the entrance to the driveways / sidewalk.
 

gwminor48

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You have some pretty good ambient light. I can't anything close to that at my location in color at night with the same camera. I have to use black and white.
 

Ajpepe72

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Thanks Matt
I do have a 4431 higher up which covers the wider view of the driveway, and the 5231rze is aimed from top of door to driveway entrance.
I could zoom it in more but it then starts to cut off some of the entrance as it’s 4m wide.
Here is an image from the 4431
 

mat200

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You have 2 views of basically the same thing. I would zoom one to the entrance as close as you can get it and use the other for car cams.
I would use the higher mounted camera if it is varifocal to zoom into the driveway entrance. ( otherwise it is a bit too high for closer views )
 

Ajpepe72

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Ok so I’ve zoomed into entrance more, first in colour which still isn’t great image wise, then in black and white zoomed and slightly zoomed out.
Ir lights on 5231 are off, because the ir lights on the 4431 are on and the 5231 seems to do fine with just the 4431 ir lights... opinions welcome ?
 

bigredfish

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I run one of two crossing driveway cameras in forced color and the other in B&W. Frankly you need a hell of a lot of white light to get clear, crisp, non-blurry moving human video in forced color at night.

The zoom and B&W helped a bunch, beyond that for forced color you need more white light
 

Kawboy12R

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I'd use the colour cam for overview. That way you get the colour information you want over a wide area and don't care so much about exact detail because you aren't going to get it anyway. Cover just the minimum amount with the other cam zoomed in to put more pixels on target and add more light, possibly with a big wide angle (basically matching the cam's FOV) external illuminator mounted high and aimed a bit higher than intuition might suggest to prevent washing out close faces. It'll even up the lighting balance of the scene and put more light on faces at a bit of a distance. Either that or point it in the center of the scene but speed up exposure time to darken down the washout. I consider 1/60th a practical maximum exposure time. I find 1/30th of a second produces blurry faces unless folks almost stop moving. If they walk sideways through the scene up fairly close where you'd get lots of pixels on target and keep going? Forget it. Tons of blurry pixels. Even someone stopped and jiggling your door handle will be moving a bit. The video might be pretty good but a still picture from a screengrab wants a frozen face.
 

Ajpepe72

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Thank you, exposure settings are on auto.

I was going to add a 30 or 50 watt white led flood light pointing down onto the area of the drive by the entrance, either to be triggered by pir or on all night via dusk/dawn sensor as I like the colour mode so would prefer to get good facial images in colour if possible.
I may even then be able to run the 4431 bullet cam (overview cam) in colour then as it’s just a general see what’s going on cam and would never be able to i.d anybody.
Ultimately another 5231 on the entrance end of the house pointing towards front door would cover everything or is 3 cameras excessive for a driveway.. lol
 

Kawboy12R

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3 cams too much? Never! Seriously, you do have a bit of a tricky driveway to cover with multiple vehicles and the tall vans that interfere with the sight lines of any single cam. You might want to experiment with a cam slightly above and directly in front of the car zoomed in on the driveway entrance. Looks like that's a natural choke point that would catch most of the traffic and the straight out angle should be optimal for most of it.
 

Ajpepe72

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That’s pretty much where my 5231 is mounted, the one that’s colour, it’s mounted under the canopy above the front door (marked by yellow arrow)to give best chance of facial recognition.
And the 4431 is mounted just below the first floor window (red arrow)
 

Kawboy12R

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Here's a quick solution to force a Dahua to a slightly faster shutter speed in dark conditions while leaving everything else automatic. Good for unpredictable conditions and if you don't want to quite leap into learning custom day/night profiles with BI, scripts, or bp2008's utility yet.

upload_2017-12-14_10-22-16.png

Changing the second shutter value from 33.33 to 16.66 ms will force the camera to have a max exposure length of 1/60th instead of 1/30th of a second while still allowing it to change faster when it sees more light.
 

Ajpepe72

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Thanks for that advice, I have changed to those settings so will see how it is when it gets dark.

My 3dnr I have set on 100 because I noticed when at 50 in colour mode at night the image, especially the road had a lot of ‘noise’ on it when the camera is zoomed into the driveway entrance.
If the camera is zoomed back out then 50 is fine with no noise, but zoomed in setting it to 100 gives me a clean image with no noise, but not sure what other adverse effects this would have on another aspect of the image if anything?
 

looney2ns

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Thanks for that advice, I have changed to those settings so will see how it is when it gets dark.

My 3dnr I have set on 100 because I noticed when at 50 in colour mode at night the image, especially the road had a lot of ‘noise’ on it when the camera is zoomed into the driveway entrance.
If the camera is zoomed back out then 50 is fine with no noise, but zoomed in setting it to 100 gives me a clean image with no noise, but not sure what other adverse effects this would have on another aspect of the image if anything?
May add motion blur. Typically you want the NR set as low as you can stand it.
 

Kawboy12R

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Noise reduction makes the scenery look nice but isn't necessarily your friend on moving targets. The last time I tried moving the slider down on a 5231 though it did squat until about 4 and then jumped to horribly noisy. No middle ground. Can't remember which firmware version that was with though. Hopefully they'll fix it.

Exposure time is similar. When you change it to make the scenery look better at night you also make everything moving blurrier. I don't give a shit what my grass looks like. I want to freeze motion to get crisp action shots. With a good lowlight cam and a bit of extra light then 1/60th is the new normal. Faster is even better but there's a tradeoff where if they DO stop completely then you'd have been better off at 1/30th. People walking, searching, and doing stuff almost never do that though.

On residential streets there's also the benefit of at least being able to recognize make/model of cars reasonably reliably at 1/60th. Any slower and moving vehicles are horribly blurred. No pride or use in have a Starlight cam that takes terribly lousy video of moving vehicles.
 

Ajpepe72

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All that makes a lot of sense, i have my frame rate set to 15fps, bit rate type=cbr, customised bit rate of 5120 and iframe interval of 15fps and I can easily identify passing cars, I have zoomed even further to entrance to improve id possibilities whilst still keeping my work van door in shot (the preferred entry location of thieves for these vans)
 

Mike.in.Minnesota

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Suggestion...
- Zoom out as far as you can to get the widest field of view to get all activity. With the cameras resolution, you should be able to zoom into the recording to get detail.
- Clone the camera, then use AOI to get the areas you want in a larger view and recordings. Then, you can set specific triggers/alerts on those areas. Can also be done is profiles and such, but this is easier (imo).

Does this make sence, or, am i sooma!
 

Kawboy12R

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Zoom out and then call CSI to enhance the image later? That doesn't work. What does work is to have one wide-angle overview camera with other specialty cameras designed to do a more specific job like capture high quality faces at the entryway 40 feet away.
 

Jinx

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Imo forget the transit door, the overview covers all that. Zoom right in on the entrance, you want just the very edges of the wall to frame the shot.

Get a third camera if you really want another area covered close up or fear people hoping the wall to gain entry.
 

Mike.in.Minnesota

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Zoom out and then call CSI to enhance the image later? That doesn't work. What does work is to have one wide-angle overview camera with other specialty cameras designed to do a more specific job like capture high quality faces at the entryway 40 feet away.
Your lake of faith disturbs me, says Yoda.


All those CSI type 'Enhance image' are false. You can;t enhance resolution that does not exist. Those programs only guess and fill in what it 'thinks' should be between the pixels it's enlarging.
 
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