Smart Events configuration?

[cctvsig]

Hello Everyone,

I am new to CCTV and I wonder if someone can help me. I have gone through a fair amount of reading (including posts from this forum) and experimentation with the objective of setting up and manage my system but there are several areas that I still have to understand. Should this be the wrong place to post this message, could you please point me in the right direction?

The system consists of DS-2DE4425IW-DE and DS-2CD2386G2-ISU/SL cameras linked to a DS-7608NI-I2/8P NVR; the issues I am trying to resolve relate to Smart Events and iVMS 4200, however I will leave the latter for later as I think resolving the hardware related issues may help with iVMS 4200 too. When I started configuring Intrusion Detection via the NVR's web interface I couldn't get it to work - more specifically it only worked on one 2386 camera. Many attempts on both types of cameras failed to generate the notifications I was trying to receive on my mobile devices, so I cleared all the Event settings (one by one as there seems to be no multiple deletion facility) and set the same events up on each unit (via virtual host, camera management, etc.). This configuration worked on some of the cameras but not on others and the problem eventually turned out to be that some of the cameras didn't keep the configuration, i.e. when I logged in the cameras again after leaving the system to work for a while the "Enable" box was unticked, despite me having saved the configuration correctly and double-checking before logging off or closing the tab (the browser is Edge Chromium 89 and this OS is Windows 10).

In general, the configuration I use for Intrusion Detection is: tick "Enable", draw one or more areas, tried both setting and not setting Min/Max Size, select Human and Vehicle as and where required, set arming schedule as needed, select Notify Surveillance Centre, Trigger Recording. This process was applied to both my failed NVR configuration attempts and the direct camera's configuration.

I took the intermediate step, before discovering that the cameras could be set individually, of setting Basic Motion Detection in the NVR, which worked as intended (not to my satisfaction, but that's more down to the nature and limitations of Motion Detection, which I am aware of).

My conclusion from the above scenario is that everything likely works as intended and the problem is with the user (me), so here are a few questions which I hope someone can help me to answer.

1. Why in your opinion I can't get Intrusion Detection to work as desired when I configure it in the NVR?
2. What is best general practice with this configuration? Is it better to configure the NVR or the cameras one by one?
3. Given that both the NVR and the cameras are configured, either to do something or to not do it, at any given time, which one overrides the other? What happens if, say, both the camera and the NVR are configured to do something?
4. What reason can you think of for the cameras to lose the configuration?
5. Is there a better way to configure the system than the method I am using, e.g. using another software, etc.?

Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond.

Ivan

 

[David]

1. Why in your opinion I can't get Intrusion Detection to work as desired when I configure it in the NVR?
2. What is best general practice with this configuration? Is it better to configure the NVR or the cameras one by one?

1. I use the same NVR and intrusion detection works for me. try setting min / max windows and disable human / vehicle.

2. Most settings (smart events etc) are configured from the NVR, some (Image etc) are done at the camera

 

[JB1970]

Hello Everyone,

I am new to CCTV and I wonder if someone can help me. I have gone through a fair amount of reading (including posts from this forum) and experimentation with the objective of setting up and manage my system but there are several areas that I still have to understand. Should this be the wrong place to post this message, could you please point me in the right direction?

The system consists of DS-2DE4425IW-DE and DS-2CD2386G2-ISU/SL cameras linked to a DS-7608NI-I2/8P NVR; the issues I am trying to resolve relate to Smart Events and iVMS 4200, however I will leave the latter for later as I think resolving the hardware related issues may help with iVMS 4200 too. When I started configuring Intrusion Detection via the NVR's web interface I couldn't get it to work - more specifically it only worked on one 2386 camera. Many attempts on both types of cameras failed to generate the notifications I was trying to receive on my mobile devices, so I cleared all the Event settings (one by one as there seems to be no multiple deletion facility) and set the same events up on each unit (via virtual host, camera management, etc.). This configuration worked on some of the cameras but not on others and the problem eventually turned out to be that some of the cameras didn't keep the configuration, i.e. when I logged in the cameras again after leaving the system to work for a while the "Enable" box was unticked, despite me having saved the configuration correctly and double-checking before logging off or closing the tab (the browser is Edge Chromium 89 and this OS is Windows 10).

In general, the configuration I use for Intrusion Detection is: tick "Enable", draw one or more areas, tried both setting and not setting Min/Max Size, select Human and Vehicle as and where required, set arming schedule as needed, select Notify Surveillance Centre, Trigger Recording. This process was applied to both my failed NVR configuration attempts and the direct camera's configuration.

I took the intermediate step, before discovering that the cameras could be set individually, of setting Basic Motion Detection in the NVR, which worked as intended (not to my satisfaction, but that's more down to the nature and limitations of Motion Detection, which I am aware of).

My conclusion from the above scenario is that everything likely works as intended and the problem is with the user (me), so here are a few questions which I hope someone can help me to answer.

1. Why in your opinion I can't get Intrusion Detection to work as desired when I configure it in the NVR?
2. What is best general practice with this configuration? Is it better to configure the NVR or the cameras one by one?
3. Given that both the NVR and the cameras are configured, either to do something or to not do it, at any given time, which one overrides the other? What happens if, say, both the camera and the NVR are configured to do something?
4. What reason can you think of for the cameras to lose the configuration?
5. Is there a better way to configure the system than the method I am using, e.g. using another software, etc.?

Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond.

Ivan

1 - Not sure however it is always best to start with the most basic requirements. For example set the intrusion area with no minimum or maximum target size, threshold set to 0 or 1, sensitivity 80 or above, both human and vehicle filtering disabled. You want to set it up initially just so that you can prove it works. Set it to trigger full screen and the audible warning. Once you have it working you can begin to tweak the settings to suit your scene and requirements.

2 - I always say the NVR. Nothing is saved in the NVR, it's saved in the camera and you are just using the NVR as an interface to program the camera. The benefit of this is that both NVR and camera menu settings will match. If you make the setting directly in the camera, the NVR is unaware and will still temporarily display the previous values causing confusion. When you reboot the NVR it will read the settings from the connected cameras and update the displayed settings in the NVR menu so that they are in sync again. Only apply a setting directly in the camera if it is not available in the NVR.

3 - See above - the settings that are displayed in the NVR are the camera settings so there's nothing to override.

4 - No reason the camera should lose it's config though as my answer "2" above, creating a setting directly in camera can cause the setting displayed in the NVR to be incorrect. One caveat to this is that there is a known issue with AcuSense cameras losing their motion detection shape randomly - you draw and save a shape and occasionally when you go back some time later your configured shape has reverted to a basic rectangle.

 

[cctvsig]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the advice and comments. I finally managed to resolve after a fair amount of experimentation with the system, which takes some time to understand. So for anyone in the future who is facing the problems I described in the original post, here is how I resolved.

Before deciding to configure Intrusion Detection at camera level, I disabled the same functionality (and all the other detection methods) at NVR level. The results were inconsistent and not all notifications worked as I planned. After some fiddling I found that Intrusion Detection and some other detection system still had areas, lines, minimum and maximum areas set. This seemed to create conflicts in the configuration, so I proceeded to remove all these settings one by one, this meant, for example, to check all the four layers of area/min/max settings on each NVR camera setting, remove them all, then do the same in each camera menu, so that I could start again from a blank sheet.

Following this, I went back to the NVR configuration and set Intrusion Detection up from scratch once again, this time confident that no unexpected settings would conflict with my new settings. It is important to observe and clarify that the NVR settings offer (in my case and with my cameras) four separate areas and each of these four slots allow the user to draw one area as well as minimum and maximum size of the detected objects. Each of these slots/layers of detection have to be configured correctly for the system to work as planned by the user/administrator.

After correctly configuring all cameras in the NVR menu, the system worked ok. I now had it running for a few days and I haven't spotted any issues that couldn't be resolved with minor tweaking and adjustments.

All working now, thank you again for your help.