Quick Tip: Tuning Your Foscam Motion Detection

If you’re using your IP camera as a monitoring tool that’s saving videos (or images) when motion takes place, then you will want to spend some time adjusting your camera’s motion detection settings. This means ensuring the available settings are optimized for the particular scene where motion needs to be captured. If you don’t adjust these settings, you’ll probably be left with a large amount of recordings that can make it difficult or tedious to review at a later date (not to mention the increased storage and bandwidth costs).

Most IP cameras provide some decent settings that allow you to customize what triggers motion and a subsequent recording. Here’s a simple example that shows you how to tune a Foscam FI9821P to capture people approaching a front step.

First, assess what kind of motion you want to capture. In this scene, the only motion that needs to be recorded is a human approaching the front step. You will also want to consider what could trigger a lot of false alarms. Any outdoor scene is always susceptible to wind motion and with several trees and other plants in this scene, we’ll need to figure out a way to ignore those and just zero-in on the area where a person would walk.

To do this on the Foscam, simply go to Settings -> Alarm -> Motion Detection. (Note: be sure you have installed their browser plug-in otherwise this menu won’t be available. The camera’s login screen provides a link to download the plug-in.)

From here, select Set Detection Area. This will open up a view of your scene overlaid with a red grid. This is where you assign areas of the scene where you want motion detection to be active (or disabled).

To ensure wind from the trees and plants are ignored, as well as vehicles passing by on the street, the entire area outside of the interlocking bricks has been de-selected. This will ensure only motion activity in the red grids will initiate a recording, greatly reducing the amount of video stored while ensuring only relevant events are saved.

The final step was to set motion sensitivity to a relatively low value — in this case a setting of “Medium” is appropriate. You could likely even go lower since a person would be a large object in this scene, so it’s highly likely the motion detection would trigger. You’ll probably need to play with the settings a bit to get the right sensitivity.

Most mid-range IP cameras and up have this kind of functionality, so I encourage you to take the time to tune your settings. You’ll be thankful in the end… and if you’re looking for an IP camera cloud storage service for all those recordings, give Camcloud a try – we have a free plan available and several paid plans that offer large amounts of cloud storage.

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