T180 night time cancelled alerts

[Rookie23]

I have recently set up the EmpireTech T180 with the latest firmware, the config changes I have made from default are:

• Set the camera to max resolution for main and substream1
• Set the 24/7 Profile to Custom1 and turned Illuminator mode OFF as the insects were causing to many alerts and I didn't need a camera light on
• The daytime alerts are working well but I get night time alerts that are being cancelled that should be alerts in my understanding from what I have set up.
• In the cancelled alerts, Motion is triggering (when using "testing & tuning" analysis) and person, car AI detection greater than 40% (see photos)

I think the AI settings are correct but I probably missing something obvious or maybe elsewhere needs changing :-(
Any ideas of what else to try?

In another matter, if I want to try and get a cleaner night vision picture on the camera, what are the main settings to try eg. contrast? (not sure I need to as the defaults seem pretty good)

 

[wittaj]

Keep in mind that the "Analyze with Deepstack/CodeProject" under "Testing & Tuning" will ALWAYS perform better than live as it is after the fact and should not be used as an analysis tool to try to figure out why it didn't see and trigger for a car or person or when it triggered. It should only be used to see what AI can find in that clip, like "hmm I wonder if AI can find a toothbrush" and then walk around with a toothbrush and have it identify it. I can run this on a camera not using AI and it will show EVERYTHING that AI has in its objects to find that it sees in the clip. This method will show you EVERY ITEM AI searches for.

You need to review the .dat files as that will show you how Deepstack/CodeProject interpreted it.


Is the AI of the camera not good enough or do you really need the Orange box and the person and vehicle label? Many have found the AI of the cameras to be sufficient for most needs. Only if you need identification of more items than people or vehicle is CodeProject needed. But with this camera at that distance, cat or dog will be tough, especially at night.


Keep in mind that this is a great OVERVIEW camera, but not real good for IDENTIFY.

At that distance, it will be tough for much cleaner images.

For objects in motion, you need faster shutter speeds, and once you do, you will probably need the illuminators on.


In terms of getting the most out of the camera, here is my "standard" post that many use as a start for dialing in day and night that helps get the clean captures and help the camera recognize people and cars.

Start with:

H264H
8192 bitrate
CBR
15FPS
15 iframes

Every field of view is different, but I have found you need contrast to usually be 6-8 higher than the brightness number at night.

We want the ability to freeze frame capture a clean image from the video at night, and that is only done with a shutter of 1/60 or faster. At night, default/auto may be on 1/12s shutter or worse to make the image bright.

In my opinion, shutter (exposure) and gain are the two most important parameters and then base the others off of it. Shutter is more important than FPS. It is the shutter speed that prevents motion blur, not FPS. 15 FPS is more than enough for surveillance cameras as we are not producing Hollywood movies. Match iframes to FPS. 15FPS is all that is usually needed.

Many people do not realize there is manual shutter that lets you adjust shutter and gain and a shutter priority that only lets you adjust shutter speed but not gain. The higher the gain, the bigger the noise and see-through ghosting start to appear because the noise is amplified. Most people select shutter priority and run a faster shutter than they should because it is likely being done at 100 gain, so it is actually defeating their purpose of a faster shutter.

Go into shutter settings and change to manual shutter and start with custom shutter as ms and change to 0-8.3ms and gain 0-50 (night) and 0-4ms exposure and 0-30 gain (day)for starters. Auto could have a shutter speed of 100ms or more with a gain at 100 and shutter priority could result in gain up at 100 which will contribute to significant ghosting and that blinding white you will get from the infrared or white light.

Now what you will notice immediately at night is that your image gets A LOT darker. That faster the shutter, the more light that is needed. But it is a balance. The nice bright night static image results in Casper blur and ghost during motion LOL. What do we want, a nice static image or a clean image when there is motion introduced to the scene?

In the daytime, if it is still too bright, then drop the 4ms down to 3ms then 2ms, etc. You have to play with it for your field of view.

Then at night, if it is too dark, then start adding ms to the time. Go to 10ms, 12ms, etc. until you find what you feel is acceptable as an image. Then have someone walk around and see if you can get a clean shot. Try not to go above 16.67ms (but certainly not above 30ms) as that tends to be the point where blur starts to occur. Conversely, if it is still bright, then drop down in time to get a faster shutter.

You can also adjust brightness and contrast to improve the image. But try not to go above 70 for anything and try to have contrast be at least 7-10 digits higher than brightness.

You can also add some gain to brighten the image - but the higher the gain, the more ghosting you get. Some cameras can go to 70 or so before it is an issue and some can't go over 50.

But adjusting those two settings will have the biggest impact. The next one is noise reduction. Want to keep that as low as possible. Depending on the amount of light you have, you might be able to get down to 40 or so at night (again camera dependent) and 20-30 during the day, but take it as low as you can before it gets too noisy. Again this one is a balance as well. Too smooth and no noise can result in soft images and contribute to blur.

Do not use backlight features until you have exhausted every other parameter setting. And if you do have to use backlight, take it down as low as possible.

After every setting adjustment, have someone walk around outside and see if you can freeze-frame to get a clean image. If not, keep changing until you do. Clean motion pictures are what we are after, not a clean static image.

 

[Rookie23]

Keep in mind that the "Analyze with Deepstack/CodeProject" under "Testing & Tuning" will ALWAYS perform better than live as it is after the fact and should not be used as an analysis tool to try to figure out why it didn't see and trigger for a car or person or when it triggered. It should only be used to see what AI can find in that clip, like "hmm I wonder if AI can find a toothbrush" and then walk around with a toothbrush and have it identify it. I can run this on a camera not using AI and it will show EVERYTHING that AI has in its objects to find that it sees in the clip. This method will show you EVERY ITEM AI searches for.

You need to review the .dat files as that will show you how Deepstack/CodeProject interpreted it.


Is the AI of the camera not good enough or do you really need the Orange box and the person and vehicle label? Many have found the AI of the cameras to be sufficient for most needs. Only if you need identification of more items than people or vehicle is CodeProject needed. But with this camera at that distance, cat or dog will be tough, especially at night.


Keep in mind that this is a great OVERVIEW camera, but not real good for IDENTIFY.

At that distance, it will be tough for much cleaner images.

For objects in motion, you need faster shutter speeds, and once you do, you will probably need the illuminators on.


In terms of getting the most out of the camera, here is my "standard" post that many use as a start for dialing in day and night that helps get the clean captures and help the camera recognize people and cars.

Thanks you for all the information, I suspected I was doing something fundamentally wrong but wasn't sure where to start to diagnose, so I can get an "alert logged" rather than a "cancelled alert".
The orange boxes were just for the post, I don't normally have them on. The images are good enough for our needs but I'll try and sharpen them.
Sounds like I need to understand how to interpret the .dat files and adjust settings accordingly, if an good posts on this around please let me know.

 

[wittaj]

Regarding the orange boxes, what I mean is you are using CodeProject and not the AI in the camera, and I was questioning if the camera AI is sufficient for your needs?

You may find that the camera AI has got so good that doing CodeProject is kinda overkill and adds more complexity, time delay, and potential for issues.

Whether to use camera AI or BI AI is obviously up to you, but of course, the AI in the camera may be more than sufficient for your needs without needing BI AI. Do you need the orange box around every object? Do you want to identify animals or logos? Or is just human or vehicle sufficient.

The camera AI is useful to many people, but BI has way more motion setting granularity than the cameras, and some people need that additional detail, especially if wanting AI for more than a car or person. For folks that want AI and alerts on animals or specifically a UPS truck then they need the additional AI.

There isn't really a best practice because every field of view is different and use case and needs are different.

To many here, BI motion without AI is more than adequate for what they do.

To many here, camera AI is more than adequate for what they do.

To many here, using the BI AI adds additional functionality that the above alone can not do.

It comes down to testing with each field of view and which one gives you the most consistent results.


While some of that third party stuff is cool like tagging was it a dog or a bear, I don't need all that fancy stuff. If my camera triggers BI to tag an alert for human or vehicle and BI can accomplish what I need by way of a text or email or push or whatever, that is sufficient for my needs. I just want to be alerted if a person or vehicle is on my property and the camera AI does a fine job with that.

However, I do run BI AI on a few cameras so that it knocks out headlight shine so that the alert image includes the vehicle. The camera AI will trigger for a car, but the alert image was always just the headlights. I also run the ANPR AI module.

The true test....I have found the AI of the cameras to work even in a freakin blizzard....imagine how much the CPU/GPU would be maxing out sending all the snow pictures for analysis to CodeProject LOL. My non-AI cams in BI were triggering all night. This picture was ran through AI (without the IVS or red lines on it) and it failed to recognize a person in the picture, but the camera AI did. This pic says it all and the video had the red box over it even in complete white out on the screen:

See this thread on how using just Dahua AI may be sufficient for your needs:

Who uses Dahua AI capable cameras? Reliable AI for triggering events? Pro's/con's?