Triggering a Group Camera with AI Enabled

[Cor K Dikland]

My BI "Frontyard_group" consists of three cameras (CodeProject.AI enabled), all which work perfectly fine during daytime hours. The problem is at night with one of the cameras (Reolink RLC-810A). It will pickup cars no problem but often (but not always) miss people walking by. The other two (Reolink RLC-410) don't have this problem.

The solution at first seemed simple. At night, when either of the other camera detect motion, trigger the 810A to record as well. The problem is if the 810A (or CodeProject.AI) does not confirm this motion nothing is recorded. I can disable the BI "Motion Trigger" as well as AI for this camera during the night time but the other two combined do not cover the entire area of the 810A. While not perfect, I would still like the keep the 810A trigger enabled. I tried to disable the 810A CodeProject.AI during the night time and while this method would capture all alerts triggered by the other 2 it also captured tons of other (unwanted) alerts by the 810A.

The ideal situation would be to keep AI and motion triggers enabled on the 810A, capture only confirmed A! alerts by this camera AND capture external AI confirmed alerts by the other 2 cameras regardless of whether they are 810A/CodeProject confirmed or not.

I am not in position to replace or move any or all of these cameras and hope to find a software solution. Is this possible within BI???

 

[wittaj]

It is well known that BI and Reolinks do not work well together, but the same principles applies for almost any low end consumer grade camera. It is just Reolinks is one of the more consumer end cameras people buy and come to this site as to why it is pointed out often about. I have a cheapo camera for overview purposes so it doesn't matter, but it exhibits this same behavior even though in the settings I can set an iframe...

This was a screenshot of a member here where they had set these cameras to 15FPS within the cameras (I suspect you will be missing motion that you do not know you are missing....):

Now look at the KEY - that is the iframes. BI works best when the FPS and the iframes match. Now this is a ratio, so it should be a 1 if it matches the FPS. The iframes not matching (that you cannot fix or change with a reolink) is why they miss motion in BI and why people have problems. This is mainly why people are having issues with these cameras and there are many threads showing the issues people have with this manufacturer and Blue Iris. It is these same games that make the camera look great as a still image or video but turn to crap once motion is introduced.

The BI developer has indicated that for best reliability, sub stream frame rate should be equal to the main stream frame rate and these cameras cannot do that and there is nothing you can do about that with these cameras... The iframe rates (something these cameras do not allow you to set) should equal the FPS, but at worse case be no more than double. This example shows the cameras going down to a keyrate of 0.25 means that the iframe rates are over 4 times the FPS and that is why motion detection is a disaster with these cameras and BI...A value of 0.5 or less is considered insufficient to trust for motion triggers reliably...try to do AI and it will be useless...

Compounding the matter even worse...motion detection is based on the substream and look at the substream FPS - they dropped down to below 6 FPS with an iframe/key rate of 0.25 - you will miss motion most of the time with that issue...

A KEY of 0.25 means that any object that can be in and out of the field of view in under 4 seconds could be completely missed by BI.

The reason they work in the daytime is there is enough light for the reolink to work properly.

Unfortunately, the firmware is written in such a way to favor a bright static image at night at the expense of getting good motion capture - most people have blur/ghost with Reolink at night. The reason for that is the firmware manipulates the settings to favor that bright image, and one of the things it does is drop that KEY value.

The only way to fix it is better cameras OR a lot more light - either visible or infrared.

 

[Cor K Dikland]

I was aware that BI and Reolink was not ideal but until now did not really understand why. Thank you for your detailed explanation. That said, regardless of the camera used, my question relates to BI and the AI combination. Specifically, externally triggering an alert on a camera regardless of whether it can confirm the motion or not. What happens now is, the 410 detects a person thereby triggering the BI On Alert: 192.168.1.230:81/admin?camera=Cam810A&trigger&memo=%001&user=me&pw=mypswd
When the 810A receives the remote trigger, it passes it on to CodeProject.AI for confirmation and if AI returns "Nothing there" the alert is not recorded . Without disabling AI or motion trigger all together I have not found a way to force BI to record the unconfirmed external trigger.

 

[wittaj]

How are you setup to record now? Just alerts, cont+alerts, cont+triggers, etc.?

How do you know it isn't recorded? Maybe you don't have the thumbnails to the right showing all recorded triggers and are just showing the AI confirmed?

Mine shows AI confirmed and nothing found because I want to see them all.

Top left, select the folder icon and select ALERTS and it will show all of them whether confirmed or not. Select CANCELLED and it will show all of those that are cancelled - are you saying nothing is shown there?

 

[Cor K Dikland]

How are you setup to record now? Just alerts, cont+alerts, cont+triggers, etc.?

At night time I have the 810A set to Continues record and Trigger motion enabled. AI had been disabled because remote triggers failed to record the alert. So I thought. I did not know about the Cancelled alerts option Just checked it out and I think this may do what I need. Thanks for the info.

 

[scoob8000]

As an aside from my little experience with reolink before I got rid of them all, make sure "smart codec" is turned off if you have that option in your cam settings. I ran into that changing the frame rate constantly.