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.

[issacarya]

I think you got to undrestand the system, in order for this option to be added you will need more power, otherwise the batteries will probably last two days, you will need a power supply to be made for the camera.

Let me explain:

at the moment it is a simple IR system that doesnt use too much power, when it detects a movement it turns the Wifi and camera on and sends all videos to Base.

If you were to use the table as a example / you will need the camera to stay on at all times to be able to tell the Arlo Base what to do.

When there is a movement in these pixels which is set to a table than start recording or send a notification etc. but that means the camera video must stay on and stream live video at all times which will drain batteries in probably 2 days or less depending on room tempreture and distance from Base etc.

Its do-able but battery will be a issue in the long run.

[dday408]

Absolutely agree!!  I am sure most people use one or two cameras pointing to the driveway or pointing out from front door.  It enevitably will record the tail of a street car.  It's not that useful the camera wakes up and drains the batteries while catching really nothing, is it?

[wlwl00]

I just got this system and was dumbfounded it didn't have zones. My logitech camera from 2010 had zones, and they worked amazing.

Here is my issue, and why I will be returning my system if I don't hear of a fix in the next 30 days. I have a street in the background of my driveway. I need to draw a zone when someone comes onto my property, but I can't get notifications everytime a car drives by! If I zoom to a little area of the driveway, then I miss the entire surrounding area, including activity AROUND my driveway! This is ridiculous.

This camera has potential. This has to be an easy fix. Sure, it cost money to develop this into the software- but so does me returning all these used and beat up cameras, and the negative reviews people like me will leave. Look at your true costs. I simply want to draw a square. Like so many cameras have. I will hold off on returning and reviewing for a month... or I'm moving on.

[XJW]

As the camera uses a PIR senor for motion detection I don't believe its possible to define zones.  Other cameras use image processing to detect changes in the image and these allow you to define zones within the image.  The downside with these is that they can be prone to false alerts and they also use a lot more power than a PIR.  This would use up the battery in an arlo camera pretty quick.

[jofoto]

Add the ability to select one (or more!) detection zones.

[donnoman]

I believe it could be handled with post processing. The IR Shows Activity, the camera wakes up taking images. That's fine.  DON'T alert at this step. The first few images are received, NOW you can make a determination based on zones whether you get an ALERT. The camera is up and recording, I just don't care to be annoyed by it unless there is motion in the zone I defined.

[Dj_Mo]

Arlo needs to give us the opportunity to determine in the photo frame what is or what is not considered motion. I had an old Astak camera where you could tell it where on the screen to "watch for motion" along with a weighted level. I have noticed after a few days that when Arlo determines motion it is lagging so much you miss the activity depending on how quick the person or thing moved. Even if they had a "tripwire device" it would get you the same results. The major problem which they are afraid of is battery life. If it was armed/active 24/7 your batery would die too quickly. 

IMHO I think that should be a setting that the end-user should have the ability to choose (real-time which will burn your battery out faster or Arlo control). Considering we can not have the "live" stream going into a different software application where it can determine motion I think they just need to update the backed-end. We need to have it deterime what motion actually is.

I personally have noticed that a small flag in the bottom right corner of the camera gets picked up, yet a car moving across the top of the frame left to right or right to left doesn't trigger as quickly as you'd expect it. Note: I have it set to 93 for motion.

I do feel this is a fantastic utility, but all this can be updated with open source and backend firmware code. I hope they would notice this and fix it. Stop thinking about the Cloud for making the reoccuing revenue and work with your customers or everyone will just stop buying the product!!!

[CoosGuy]

Arlo would be much more useful if users could define the motion detection zone.  I am certain that all pet owners would agree that dozens of motion alerts are senseless.    Unfortunately, they are unavoidable when the motion detection is based on the entire field of view.  I use smartcam from another manufacturer for a vacation home and it has this feature.  Users can create up to 3 variable sized and placed zones for each camera.   It is a giant plus and makes the other camera much, much more valuable to me.

This seems like it would be relatively easy to program this into the software.

[JamesC]

This feature is now available on the Arlo Q!

[demetreb]

This is a standard software feature on all security cameras.  If the arlo Q is capable of software based zone trigger deletes/additions then the line of code is capable with the standard cameras.  IT would help with battery life, false triggers and storage capacity issues