Motion Detection in CCTV Leave a comment

Nowadays, many people choose to install surveillance systems that can be accessed remotely for convenience purposes. One benefit of remote surveillance is that property owners don’t have to hire anyone to continuously watch their security cameras because alerts can be set up to notify the owner if an event happens. But how does the surveillance system know that something has happened? The most used method is through motion detection.

How Does Motion Detection Work?

In order to understand how motion detection works, we must first understand how security cameras work. In every camera, there is an image sensor. The image sensor is responsible for converting the light that hits the camera lens into information used to make up an image. Each image is made up of pixels.

These pixels are important for determining if any movement has occurred. The camera compares each image frame-by-frame to see if there’s been any changes in the pixels. Stationary objects like buildings or parked cars won’t have any sudden changes in pixels like moving items. These sudden pixel changes is what determines if motion took place.

Types of Motion Settings

However, pixels are prone to changes due to different things like lighting or shadows so more criteria must be met for motion to be recognized. There are 3 motion settings that determines if the pixel changes are enough to be considered a motion event. These settings can be adjusted to eliminate any false alarms. They are called sensitivity, threshold, and anti-dither.

Each image from the camera is divided up into sections like a grid and each of these areas are made up of pixels. Sensitivity determines how much or how little change has occurred in each one of these areas to be considered as motion. If you set your sensitivity lower, it will be less likely to count changes as motion whereas a higher sensitivity will be more likely to consider changes.

As mentioned before, each image is made up of individual areas. Threshold setting is based on what percentage of these areas are experiencing motion for it to be considered a motion event. Let’s say that your camera is 4×4 for a total of 16 areas and you set your threshold setting to 50. This means that 50% of the image, or 8 areas, will need to be experiencing motion for it to be counted as a motion event.

The last setting, anti-dither, is a timer between 0-100 that is triggered after the sensitivity and threshold settings have been met. Let’s say that you have set the anti-dither to 5 seconds. This means that 5 seconds will have to pass after the sensitivity and threshold have been triggered for the movement to be recognized as a motion event.

Benefits of Motion Detection

As mentioned in the introduction, one benefit of motion detection is that it improves remote surveillance. Motion detection allows property owners to be alerted of suspicious activity instantly without having to continuously keep watch over the cameras. Users can even increase the relevancy of these alerts by adjusting the motion detection settings.

Another benefit of motion detection is that it makes playing back footage easier. One common issue that people have with reviewing recordings is that finding specific events can be difficult and tedious because there’s so much irrelevant footage to go through. With motion detection, every motion event is logged in the video recorder so that the user can easily find events.

Motion detection is also be useful for saving storage space on your video recorder. Users can configure their surveillance systems to only start recording when motion is detected, which may indicate suspicious activity. Doing this maximizes storage space because irrelevant footage won’t be recorded and stored.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any more questions. You can call us at 877-926-2288 or connect with us on social media
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