Motion detection on only part of the view without sacrificing any of the screen

[AskMcGowan]

To explain this I am going to use a living room as an example.

The way it currently is set:

Put the camera in the corner of the room and catch the entire room - Fantastic!

Anyone walks into the view, it records - Fantastic!

Now say there is a glass on a table in the middle of the room. 

I can "crop" or "zoom in" on the table and the camera will shoot only that, so if someone touches the glass it records, but it only shows the table.

What I want: Show the entire room - BUT - only put the motion detection on the table, so the entire room is in the camera view but the recording only happens if someone is in the table view. This way I can see where the person went, who the person was, etc instead of potentially just the hand grabbing the glass.

[Therms]

@thenosyt This wouldn't really do anything for camera battery life.  The only thing it would do is cut down on the number of notifications you get and the number of videos you have in your list of recorded video.  The camera would have to send the same amount of video to Netgear's servers for analysis and use the same amount of battery to do so.

Unless the camera has some currently-unused hardware on board, there is no way for it to do zone analysis in the camera itself.

[thenosyt]

@ThermsLet me get this straight...

I have my cameras set up to record 2 minute videos when it detects motion.

You're saying that even though the camera's zones have been set up, it still would have to record for an entire 2 minutes to be processed/analysed for its zoning?

[LADahya]

Developer recommendation.

It would be beneficial to users to be able to drag and drop a box around an area you would like the motion detection to work at full sensitivity not to miss anything coming into that area without compromising the viewing area when viewing a camera 24/7 on a screen.   Viewing more than one camera on a screen at a time would also be a handy feature.

Having the motion detection area setting will allow users to reduce the battery load by not triggering on things that dont matter, while reducing the number of images you store on your system.that have little or no use to anyone and saves the users time having to go through loads of useless images to try find sometihng that should be quite simple and isolated.  Batteries are expensive and swapping them out is labour intensive.

Hope you can look at changing the software to allow this to happen as I believe it the camera should be reporting areas it is picking up anything and all the developers will need to do is identify the actual area to monitor, capture it all, analyse the information and only activate from the actual area selected.

Hope this happens on next release.

Thanks
 

[Therms]

@thenosyt I suppose it's possible that the video could be streamed to Netgear, analyzed, and the results communicated back to the camera quickly enough to avoid having to record the whole video.

However, I suspect the following:

1.  It would not react quickly enough, often enough, to prevent recording much.

2.  The camera waking from sleep when triggered by IR motion sensor is the largest or at least a very significant part of power drain...dependent upon the strength of the WiFi signal at the camera's location.  The weaker the signal, the more power it requires for the camera, and thus a smaller proportion of the total power usage goes to waking up relative to the power usage of just waking up the camera.

[mocodi]

That ability basically requires video analysis type motion detection, where the camera is always running (though not necessarily recording) and the live video is continuously analysed for trigger criteria. I think Arlo Q and many other wired cameras do it that way.

It's too power-hungry for Arlo, which is why it uses PIR (passive infra-red) motion detection instead. PIR doesn't really lend itself to neatly selecting which parts of a scene to detect motion in, though it's possible to do in a crude way by physically masking parts of the PIR sensor.

Video analysis could be applied at the base unit or Netgear's servers after the Arlo has already been triggered and sent video. That might reduce pointless videos and nuisance alerts, but wouldn't help battery life (and might be counter-productive for it if it conceals the fact that the camera is running too frequently).

[Supernono]

I own two camera and I would like to view the whole front of my home and only record when someone is on my property . Right now I have to aim my camera in a position when I can't view the front of my home because they record street traffic.

[luxx989]

Would like to block zones or shapes.  Street traffic is bad, and also the sun rising through a tree keeps setting one of mine off when the wind moves the tree.  I would like to be able to cover the side of my house, but I would get tons of notification everytime my neighbor went to his back yard, on his property.  This is probably my number one feature request right now, NUMBER ONE!   Thanks

[MajikSpoon]

Unfortunately, I don't think this is possible with this camera since in order for it to be a completely wireless system and still have a battery that can last to the advertised 4-6 months, the motion detection is performed by a "dumb" sensor that runs at very low power that wakes the camera up to take video. This sensor is not able to be changed into zones, only it's sensitivity can be changed.

Alternatively, It may be a viable option for Netgear to modify it so that the camera wakes up and does a secondary motion check to see if the clip is worth recording using zones. It just will end up triggering pretty often if you set the camera near things that sway in the wind.

[kongee]

I am in the same situation with all the others.  the potential for this feature would be benefitcial to everyone and would allow for more customers to purchase the product.

Synology software allows for this!

[Molurus93]

Maybe its a idea to be able to blur out certain area's (tree's and plants) so when Arlo detects motion and the object is in that specific area, no notification or video should be record.