I currently have motion detection turned on for my cameras, and they’re constantly recording because of flying bugs. I’ve attempted to correct the issue by adjusting the time sensitivity to 5 seconds and adjusting the motion sensitivity. Does anyone have any suggestions to lower my false/positives?
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Hi Nick! Turn on the IR and fry them away ;). Just kidding! I agree with you that this is tricky and there are no standard solutions. Change Motion Algorithm to Blob detection can help sometimes.
-Henrik
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I’m in the same situation. I can only use Netcam studio and my camera for video recording and to see after-the-fact events, but not as alerts because of the bugs flying around all night.
I use blob detecrion, but still haven’t found the right settings to make it work better. I wish there were some smarts to the algorithm to better detect “objects” or “people”, etc…
You have probably made an Internet search for this also and it do not have an easy low cost solution. However, something that solves the problem for many or it is getting much better is to use a cam with non-IR (or turn it off) and use an external IR source. Built in IR is convenient, but the reflections from bugs and rain is a problem for the algorithm that mostly is based on differences between areas.
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Having a setting for minimum motion time would probably filter out a LOT of the bugs. The bugs appear as almost “flickers” for milliseconds so ignoring anything shorter than 500ms or a second would cut out a lot. Especially if blob detection or another method is able to identify continuous movement of an object in the filed of view. I remember seeing on Youtube a rather impressive video awhile back of software being able to still spot relevant motion when the camera had driving rain or snow flurries. Probably very similar to if you had an image with a lot of noise/static.
In a way you have a time dependent filter already. Sensibility is a filter related to time that tells the motion algorithm how to react to fast or slow movements. A high Sensibility lets the algorithm react to slow moving objects. A low or very low Sensibility will make the algorithm slower and do not react to fast moving objects, the integration time. Test to set Sensibility to low or very low and see what happens. I am not sure about the integration time on the filter. Maybe, it should have a settings for bugs? I am not always so enthusiastic about settings that can filter out motions since it increase the complexity and then you must understand more.
Check how the Sensibility works.
-Henrik
Would it be possible have something in the scheduler that chooses which set of settings to use at what time? My IR camera records pretty much what I want in the daytime but at night I get loads of bug recordings. I’d be reluctant to reduce the sensitivity in the day but at night it would probably be a good idea. Arlo have something like this. You set up modes which define which cameras are set to record and at what sensitivity etc then if you want in the scheduler you can choose the mode that should be in use for each hour in each day. Anyway just thought you may like to know what Arlo do if you don’t already!
Hi,
These bugs are annoying, but we can´t live without them so we got to love them 
Seriously, of cause it is annoying with all these false alarms. Other developers have different solutions and Arlo is one of them as you say. NCS is created to keep it as simple as possible. Adding more options also make it more complex and easier to make mistakes. To not have MD or recording running is really not good and therefore, NCS is rather clean on options. But, you should never say never ;). The more people that ask … Thanks for the input and you are on the list.
Just an idea, add the same camera twice. One of them you can set up as the day time camera and configure that one for non-bug mode and schedule to run daytime. The other one config for bug mode to run night time. These should not overlap, but that depends on the camera if that works or not. Of cause you will have 2 camera files instead of one, but that maybe is better than one with all the false alarms?
If you are into testing mode give this a try and report back how it goes. I might have missed something just now since I am in the enthusiastic mode
Henrik
Thanks, I’ll give that a try and let you know. I quite like the idea of adding the cameras multiple times and it’ll be good having the output in the different file sets. It may not be for a while as just at the moment I don’t want to mess anything up and I ought doing other things not on the computer!!! Glad you are in enthusiastic mode. Keep up the great work.
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About IR and flying bugs, this is a common problem for all those cameras with internal IR light, and not only bugs with also teh thinnest web spider will show blow like sunshine and produce motion alert because the smallest wind will make it move.
The solution is to buy an external IR projector (cost $10) that you put a few feet away from the camera and turn off internal IR Leds (of teardown the camera to disconnect the wires that power the IR lights).
Bad ass work around buddy. thanks for bringing that option to light. bye bye 1500 alerts a night!
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I was also getting too many false motion alerts from insects flying in front of camera. I ended up using AI to filter the motion alerts and setup a free service for anyone else to do the same at https://www.smartalerts.io/. Hope this helps.