Camera doesn't pick up my car's motion from 8 feet away

[NewfieDrool]

Hi

ive been trying just about everything under the sun to work out why the camera fails to detect my van returning back to the drive and most of the time leaving.

its picking up everything else, traffic on the road is picked up but a van that’s about 8ft from the camera just fails. I’ve adjusted all the settings and angled the camera all over the place so I’m wondering if colour ie silver is an issue??

ive added a quick video.

you will just see the van leaving at 13.10 but it’s failing to spot the van parking up each and every time. 

I enter at an angle so it should pick it up like it does with the cars on the road but I’m lost at why it’s failing. 

https://youtu.be/xzu8A0r_Dwo

At the moment anyone could could come along and help themselves and if I’m lucky I might just get alerted as it’s driven off 🙂

[StephenB]

The van is a big target, so you would think it'd be easy to pick up.

Have you tried increasing the motion detection threshold?

Also, the motion detecton works best at bottom of the field of view, and the van is in the top half.  Perhaps try aiming the camera higher (so the wheels of the van are at the bottom of the image).  

[NewfieDrool]

Thanks, I’ll go high and see what happen.

ive  tried the sensitivity from 100 down to 13. As you go up in the numbers so does the amount of notifications and recordings.  At 100 I had 264 recordings in one day which half killed the battery.

I have noticed movement reflections on the van are picked up as movement  and you get the shadow movement when you view the footage.

I’ll try moving the camera up and see what happens.

[NewfieDrool]

I’ve raised it up.

lets hope they fix the pixel problem too as it’s pretty grim.

heres the height with the lovely  pixelation pulse problem thrown in. 

 Strangely I set the siren off when I just did it and got the alert but no video but I also notice my videos are loading slowly and it could be something to do with their service at the moment .

https://youtu.be/Ley-ADjig4Y

[StephenB]

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@NewfieDrool wrote:

I have noticed movement reflections on the van are picked up as movement  and you get the shadow movement when you view the footage.

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Yes.  I get alerts on my porch window reflections.  I use activity zones to manage them (though they don't quite get them all).

[NewfieDrool]

Well I’m afraid to say moving the camera up has failed.

i got in the van, drove off, returned and it’s failed to pick the van up on both  occasions today and yesterday.

its picking cars up 25ft away so I can only think it’s the silver colour that can be creating an issue. I’ll get my friend to park hers on my drive at some point but at the moment it’s just not having it.

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@StephenB wrote:

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@NewfieDrool wrote:

I have noticed movement reflections on the van are picked up as movement  and you get the shadow movement when you view the footage.

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Yes.  I get alerts on my porch window reflections.  I use activity zones to manage them (though they don't quite get them all).

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[StephenB]

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@NewfieDrool wrote:

Well I’m afraid to say moving the camera up has failed.

i got in the van, drove off, returned and it’s failed to pick the van up on both  occasions today and yesterday.

its picking cars up 25ft away so I can only think it’s the silver colour that can be creating an issue. I’ll get my friend to park hers on my drive at some point but at the moment it’s just not having it.

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Is it practical to (temporarily) run an extension cord to the camera location, and power it with the charger?  It will use local pixel processing as well as IR motion sensing when it's powered.

[NewfieDrool]

Sadly not able to. What I’ve done now is angled the camera as much as possible trying to avoid detections from the road but keeping the van just in view. I’m hoping I can up the  sensitivity without getting hundreds of alerts this way.

I did try the free trial with the smart zones but I found that failed too so I opted out. 

[brh]

@NewfieDrool,

out of curiosity, have you tried mounting the camera upside down and in the settings rotating the image 180 degrees? This has worked for me in difficult locations. Secondly, sometimes slow movement can fool the motion sensors to not activate. Thirdly, based on my experiments, color can make a difference, although both my family vehicles are silver and I catch all the motion from them. If the dark vehicle belongs to you, what happens if you swap the locations of the vehicles, (parking the dark vehicle in front of the van),? Fourthly, if the camera is recording but the silver vehicle is not showing up, it could be a lag due to the cloud. 

Brian

[NewfieDrool]

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@brh wrote:

@NewfieDrool,

out of curiosity, have you tried mounting the camera upside down and in the settings rotating the image 180 degrees? This has worked for me in difficult locations. Secondly, sometimes slow movement can fool the motion sensors to not activate. Thirdly, based on my experiments, color can make a difference, although both my family vehicles are silver and I catch all the motion from them. If the dark vehicle belongs to you, what happens if you swap the locations of the vehicles, (parking the dark vehicle in front of the van),? Fourthly, if the camera is recording but the silver vehicle is not showing up, it could be a lag due to the cloud. 

Brian

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Hi Brian

the other car is my  neighbours but it’s not moved for a while as she’s just had a hip replacement as it would be a good test when my vans away.

 Definitely not lag as it’s happing too often. 

Thanks for the tip about rotating the camera, I’ll try that if this new position fails.

The alarm went off this morning and it picked up a cat which is good.

what I’m hoping is that by altering the camera angle to try to avoid the road movement I have been able to up my sensitivity. 

https://youtu.be/5KPbMUluGD4

[StephenB]

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@NewfieDrool wrote:

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Thanks for the tip about rotating the camera, I’ll try that if this new position fails.

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Rotating 90 degrees might also be worth a shot - and might also prevent notifications from the street (since it would be out of the field of view).

Though it is awkward to review the clips when you rotate to portrait, since there is no good way to auto-rotate them in playback.

[NewfieDrool]

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@StephenB wrote:

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@NewfieDrool wrote:

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Thanks for the tip about rotating the camera, I’ll try that if this new position fails.

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Rotating 90 degrees might also be worth a shot - and might also prevent notifications from the street (since it would be out of the field of view).

Though it is awkward to review the clips when you rotate to portrait, since there is no good way to auto-rotate them in playback.

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Im at my companions at the moment waiting for her to return from holiday and so far I’ve not had any alerts and I keep increasing the sensitivity. Up to 60 now so maybe the angle I had was not right. Hopefully it will detect me when I return home.