@bp2008 - as you are seeing, these are not plug and play. You have to dial them in. But once you do, they are incredible. Mine hits the mark over 95% of the time.
Are you running default/auto settings?
It is a matter of getting the brightness/contrast and target ratio settings correct.
Looking at your image above, there is a lot of gray (yeah I know it is B/W lol) so it all blends in the eyes of the PTZ. Adjusting the parameters can help give it a little bit of contrast so that it has an easier time tracking.
I always knew that you shouldn't chase a bright picture - it looks nice and people migrate towards a brighter TV for example, but upon closer examination, most images need to be toned down in order to get all the details. You will be surprised how much changing a parameter like gamma could impact tracking. For example, if you have a pesky tree or something in the middle of the view during an autotrack, just by changing some image parameters you can get autotrack to pass it. Making the image a little darker at night actually helped with tracking someone across the street, which was opposite of what I thought you would think to do. So add some contrast to your image above and see if it improves.
I have a yard lamp post that more times than not autotrack would get stuck on it as someone was walking and the autotrack would only go so far. Because my image has soo much contrast (bright white concrete a third, blacktop road a third, grass a third), knocking down the gamma made the lamp post not be so "trackable" lol, and along with that I turned of PFA and that gave it just enough time to retrack the person walking past the lamp post. The camera may still autotrack the lamp post when a small kid goes by, but an adult it was autotracking past the lamp post.
A big issue I had when I first got mine was I couldn't get the autotrack to zoom in closer than 7x. Just by changing your initial FOV and adjusting IVS size to give it some headroom made a big difference. Not using a minimum target size made a big difference - keep it at 0,0 (which it looks like you are doing) and let AI do its thing. This thing will now zoom in 25x and have a nice tight shot of someone hundreds of feet away.
After you do the above, it will start to work better. To further address your big 3 complaints:
1. Awful target acquisition success rate.
Ideally for an intrusion box or tripwires, you should have the initial field of view be such that the camera doesn't have to initially pan too much up/down or left/right to get the object in the center of the screen to start tracking. The closer the object is to the center of the image, the better the chance that it will track correctly.
The reason it starts looking upward or left or right is usually because the intrusion box is too big so the camera identifies the object before it is in the center of the field of view and then sometimes something else matches the "algorithm signature" of the initial object and then starts trying to track something that isn't there. Adjusting the field of view and the locations of the IVS rules to be closer to the center can fix that.
Alternatively, you can set the PTZ to limit the up range so that it won't do that, but I would prefer dialing it in first and only do this if it still happens.
2. Dumb Track Time setting
This one is simple - simply make it 300 seconds. As soon as the object is out of the field of view (probably within 300 seconds) it swings back to home.
This PTZ does need to be set in Explorer or you can only set this time to 15 seconds. It will revert back to 15 in any other browser.
3. Target Tracking Size
Make sure you don't give a min object size - keep it at 0,0. Looking at your initial field of view, you need to drop the target tracking size lower. Try 35 and test it and move up and down from there. And then give it some time. After about a week, mine started tracking more the head than the body.