My idea is for Loiter Detection.
What is Loiter Detection? Put simply, it is an event where motion lasts beyond a certain prescribed time.
An example is, we know that it takes under 5s for someone to deliver a package to our door, right? This is general. Even the largest of packages, it doesn’t take 10s for the carrier to drop it off. Similarly, depending on where you live, a vehicle drives by pretty quickly and is rarely in the frame of the camera for more than 2s unless it’s crawling or stopped.
So, there’s this setting for loiter. It’s got several options, one for people and one for general motion. We have chosen to set it to 15s (but the option exists for it to go higher). We would still get normal motion + person (when that feature returns) detection and recordings, but then at 15s, our app would trigger a separate, direr (persistent warning) that something or someone is loitering. This would catch and keep your attention, you’d want to check this one out for sure.
The thought behind it is pretty simple. Some of us get a lot of detections and we tend to drown them out due to thinking, hey it’s probably a bush or something flying in the wind…maybe just a car passing by. This kinda makes the point of own the cameras moot. Some of us have been more careful and in order to cut false detections, we zone out our roads, etc. but these are still places that suspicious or odd activity could take place.
I love person detection because it cleared a lot of this for me. I personally have my cameras to a point where I don’t get very many false detections. But I am one of those people who would either point the camera so it can’t see the road or zone out the road, until I started reading and hearing about things that happen to homes and people elsewhere.
I think Loiter would add an extra layer of security. I’ve been looking through my local Neighborhood app and many of the “suspicious” posts are of vehicles that drive by and stop or drive very slowly by a residence or people who walk up to or approach a home until they see a doorbell camera, etc. This is what people want to catch. Sure you CAN catch it with normal motion and person detection IF you have it set up that way, most don’t.
Loiter would fix this. If would “ignore” the vehicle zooming through (let’s leave that to 24x7 capture) and catch the vehicle that took 10s to slowly drive by your home. If would let you know that for 10s, someone has been slowly approaching your home or hanging out in your driveway/porch and give you a more urgent reaction/response than a simple banner.
Along with Loiter, as mentioned, Ignore Motion under XXs settings could be another option or something additional to Loiter. With this setting, you could make it so motion detection events would ignore motion if it’s under, say 5s. This would ignore the majority of cars driving but catch the ones slowly driving by or the people walking by with their dog (who may stop to poop in your yard).
My 2c! Hope you guys like these ideas.