Auto Tracking Pets with Dahua

M

Michael James

Getting the hang of it
Dec 20, 2016
277
41
Camera: Loryta Outdoor 2MP Starlight 25X Optical Zoom IR PTZ Smart AI IP Camera Support Auto-Tracking, Perimeter Protection ,PoE+ ,Face Detection,Smart Capture ,SD49225XA-HNR

Issue: Trying to get it to track animals (130 lb newfoundland dog)

It appears the camera sees the dog and puts a light blue rectangle around it. But it wont actually move the camera, nor will it zoom in on the dog. But the rectangle stays around the dog as my dog moves but when the dog moves off camera it wont follow or zoom in on. On a rare occasion the box will change to red and zoom in for a few seconds then back out again immediately.

Any tweaks I can try? I'm using 2 different intrusion rules..1 for people and 1 for dogs
 

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That is one of the complaints about the AI in the cameras as they are designed for their target audience, which is triggering for humans and vehicles. There are some tricks that may work, but it won't be consisent.

Detecting wildlife with Dahua cameras

I'm starting this thread to be a resource for people wanting to use Dahua IP cameras to monitor and view wildlife. If you're among the majority of users who want your cameras to ignore detection of cats, dogs, and other animals, you are fortunate that the newer cameras do this quite...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
That 51 is not to high?
 
wittaj said:
That is one of the complaints about the AI in the cameras as they are designed for their target audience, which is triggering for humans and vehicles.
Click to expand...

In earlier firmware it was better at tracking animals and it was considered a bug and was fixed for the reasons you give.
There are some custom solutions for tracking certain four legged animals but dont hold your breath for it coming en mass.
He'd be better off teaching the dog to walk stood up!
 
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cctv-dave said:
In earlier firmware it was better at tracking animals and it was considered a bug and was fixed for the reasons you give.
There are some custom solutions for tracking certain four legged animals but dont hold your breath for it coming en mass.
He'd be better off teaching the dog to walk stood up!
Click to expand...

Yeah, my one neighbor has this one with AI and my other neighbor has one without AI.

The one with AI wanted to be able to track his dog, so they swapped and both are happy. The neighbor with the non-AI one that only wanted to track cars and people now get that and the neighbor that had the AI one that wanted to track dogs now can since they swapped LOL. One could probably buy this one and flash it with the non-AI firmware provided the chipset isn't different.

 
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That's interesting, you have a blue rectangle around the dog. I can't get that using dahua software - but I do if I go through BI.

I prefer the camera to do the 'heavy lifting' - and I have the same issue in that the cameras don't
PTZ for animals. Just had a pheasant walk boldly in front of one of mine (it's 2 feet above the ground) - It triggered
but didn't PTZ.

Have you managed any solution?

Mine are Dahua : 225XA & 425XB
 
GeoffColl said:
That's interesting, you have a blue rectangle around the dog. I can't get that using dahua software - but I do if I go through BI.

I prefer the camera to do the 'heavy lifting' - and I have the same issue in that the cameras don't
PTZ for animals. Just had a pheasant walk boldly in front of one of mine (it's 2 feet above the ground) - It triggered
but didn't PTZ.

Have you managed any solution?

Mine are Dahua : 225XA & 425XB
Click to expand...

no. I was looking for an easy answer
 
Thanks. Did see that, but I don't imagine Dahua flash their own cams when they use them themselves for wildlife monitoring; do they? 




:idk:
 
They simply do what we do and not update the firmware LOL.

Or maybe they are using a model that doesn't have AI. There are plenty of dahua cameras without AI that will trigger on wildlife, or a leaf or a shadow LOL.

Look at my neighbors in the example above - one had the model version without AI and the other had a model with AI, so they swapped and both became happy.
 
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What if you turn on Motion detection?
 
Min target should be 0, let AI decide on that.
 
Did you end up figuring this out? I'm having exactly the same problem!

I've got a DH-SDT3E410-8P-MB-A-PV1, and it's got an additional panoramic camera on top of the PTZ. This allows the PTZ to be activated by IVS rules set on the panoramic camera, and move it into position to track the object.

I can get it to work flawlessly for humans, but most of the reason I bought this was so that my dad can track his dog in the backyard when he's not home.

It only ever seems to track the dog very intermittently. It seems that for the 10% of the time where it recognizes it as a valid target, it's rock solid and doesn't lose sight of him. But the other 90% of times, he could cross literally a minefield of criss-crossing IVS tripwires, and the PTZ wouldn't blink an eye.

The weird thing is that on the live view within the web UI, you can clearly see that the camera recognizes the dog as an object, because there's a light blue bounding box around him whenever he moves. However, it hardly ever seems to turn into the desired red crosshair and start tracking him.

I've tried every single combination of settings I can think of, including setting the 'tracking target size ratio' to every value within increments of 10, starting from 0. It doesn't seem to make a difference, except for changing the auto-zoom level when it recognizes humans.

I've tried setting a minimum size, and even not setting a minimum size - no difference.
I've tried the latest firmware, and even a custom firmware by Andy which enables zoom on auto-tracking (Dahua OEM firmware doesn't allow this on this model).
I've tried rebooting the camera several times through the WebUI to no effect.
I've tried both tripwire and intrusion boxes - no difference.

The most frustrating thing about this is that when I first set this up, it WAS working flawlessly tracking the dog using the initial firmware (albeit not zooming in). So I know it's possible. I just can't get a copy of the older firmware :(
 
Dahua never released any PTZ camera which officially supported animal tracking (in spec sheet). Only human and vehicles.

Older non-AI models did that, but only because they couldn't differentiate animal from human.

Sometimes never AI models track bigger animals, but only because they think that this is human. Non ideal AI models...
If you had that firmware before, you can try to find it and downgrade.. Ask your seller, Dahua reps have access to big internal firmware repository..

Similar to fixed cams:
the only cams which had any support (in IVS) for animals were 54IR/74IR..
now Dahua have released first cam (54PRO), which can differentiate animal type using new Xinghan AI models. But NVRs for now, don't support displaying that information from IVS records.

In 2026 we should see a lot of new PTZs released (actual models had been 3-4 years on the market) with new WizTracking (aka Auto Tracking 4.0) based on Xinghan AI models..
Maybe (big Maybe) Dahua will implement in some models animal tracking.. they have now new AI models for that.. but big Maybe...
 
steve1225 said:
Dahua never released any PTZ camera which officially supported animal tracking (in spec sheet). Only human and vehicles.

Older non-AI models did that, but only because they couldn't differentiate animal from human.

Sometimes never AI models track bigger animals, but only because they think that this is human. Non ideal AI models...
If you had that firmware before, you can try to find it and downgrade.. Ask your seller, Dahua reps have access to big internal firmware repository..

Similar to fixed cams:
the only cams which had any support (in IVS) for animals were 54IR/74IR..
now Dahua have released first cam (54PRO), which can differentiate animal type using new Xinghan AI models. But NVRs for now, don't support displaying that information from IVS records.

In 2026 we should see a lot of new PTZs released (actual models had been 3-4 years on the market) with new WizTracking (aka Auto Tracking 4.0) based on Xinghan AI models..
Maybe (big Maybe) Dahua will implement in some models animal tracking.. they have now new AI models for that.. but big Maybe...
Click to expand...
I don't particularly care if there isn't an explicit 'animal' setting, so long as it detects the dog as an 'object' and tracks it -- which I know it is more than capable of doing with the right firmware.
 
Corvus85 said:
I don't particularly care if there isn't an explicit 'animal' setting, so long as it detects the dog as an 'object' and tracks it -- which I know it is more than capable of doing with the right firmware.
Click to expand...


Not consistently. It will be hit and miss at best.
Its simply not designed for it, and the AI in $200-$500 cameras isnt exactly world class cutting edge yet.

It will track garbage cans pretty well though


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