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Preclusive areas: exclude alarms if a referent camera contains movement

Little know fact: Xeoma also offers the ability to exclude alarms if some part of the picture or a referent camera contains movement.

What does it mean?

Imagine you have a outdoor video surveillance system watching for intrusion around your house. One camera has a perfect view on potential “entry points” – areas where intrusion is supposed to come from. But it might capture excessive motion too – for example, headlights of passer-by cars.

There are 2 meain direction you can take the detection in this case:

1. Focus on the object type that the system needs to be looking for in the picture rather than excluding everything that should not. This way, you can select “Detect only cars and people” detection method in Xeoma’s Motion Detector settings (option available in Xeoma Pro) or use an AI-based Object Recognizer module. The logic is simple^ only react to the type of object that you want the system to react to, and ignore all other types of motion.

2. Preclusive motion feature: another camera or part of the image can be used as a referent for a checkup: if there is motion detected in that area or camera, it’s probably a false alarm. In our example, it might be a camera facing a roof of the house where no real motion can be. If motion is detected in the “main” monitoring zone, that “additional” area is checked too, and if it has motion event in there too, it’s considered a false alarm.

You can have a chain like this:

Universal Camera 1 – Motion detector 1 (where false alarms are caught) – Condition
Universal Camera 2 – Scheduler – Motion detector 2 (where normal motion detections are caught) – Same Condition (see above)
And finish them with Condition -> Preview and Archive

Select “Logical AND” and tick Motion Detector 2 in Condition’s setting. In means that archive will be recorded only when MD#2 is triggered and MD#1 is not. If MD#1 is triggered too – archive is not recorded.

Please note that this will be 2 cameras, so you will need a license for 2 cameras for that.

Or, if a referent area is within the same camera view, then just use 2 Motion Detectors steming from one camera module:


Motion Detector 1 is a normal detector that looks for motion is the zones you actually need to monitor.
Motion Detector 2 is a detector that works only at nighttime and is set for zones that shouldn’t have any motion (e.g. high on wall).

Here is what the Condition settings should look like:

Hope this helps!

See more:
Getting to know the Motion Detector
Object Recognition: AI-based additional module in Xeoma