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Car dealership security cameras that know a person from a passing car

Your lot faces a road on purpose, because that is how you sell cars. It is also why your cameras alert every ninety seconds, all night.
Draw a zone on a clip
  • Keep the cameras on the lot
  • Person alerts overnight
  • No face recognition, ever

Interior, after hours

Fixed camera, low light, two subjects

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Clip

Decoded in your browser. Your video is never uploaded.

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Sets the luma delta threshold and the smallest region that counts.

0.4s

Kills the one frame flicker that no operator wants paged about.

Exclude zone

Put it over the road, the tree, the neighbour's window. Events inside it stop alerting.

The frame an event was found on shows up here.

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Nothing selected yet

Hover a row in the event table to preview its frame, click it to hold the frame and jump the clip there.

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Motion events found

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Dropped by zone

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Dropped, too short

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Alerts you would get

# Start Length Class Conf. Area

Reading the clip. Events appear here as they are found.

01 The frontage problem, stated plainly

A camera pointed at stock is also pointed at traffic, and traffic never stops.

Every other site on this list can move a camera until the noise goes away. A dealership cannot. The stock is at the boundary, the boundary is the road, and the road is the source of the false alerts. Sensitivity does not fix this, because the passing cars are real motion and lowering the threshold until they stop firing also stops a person firing.

Two things fix it together. An exclude zone drawn at the kerb removes everything whose centre of motion is on the carriageway. Class filtering then removes the rest: a vehicle that crosses the frontage at 40mph is a vehicle event you never see, and a person who steps out of one at 03:00 onto your forecourt is the alert.

You can draw exactly that polygon and watch the count drop in the demo, on a clip of your own frontage if you have one.

Overnight on the frontage What reaches a phone
Car passes on the road Nothing. Inside the exclude zone.
Headlights sweep across the stock Nothing. Whole frame brightness, absorbed.
Fox crosses the forecourt Nothing. Classified as animal.
Car stops on the forecourt at 02:40 Vehicle alert, because it stopped inside the lot.
Person walks between the front row Person alert, immediately.
Person crouches at a wheel arch for 2 minutes Person alert with a 2 minute duration on the row.

A worked example of the output's shape, written to be checked against your own lot. It is not a customer's footage and not a measured result.

02 Duration is the tell

On a lot, how long somebody stayed is worth more than the fact they were there.

People walk past a dealership constantly. What separates a pedestrian from a problem is that the pedestrian keeps walking. Every event carries a real duration, so the rule you actually want is not "tell me about people", it is "tell me about a person who was on the forecourt for more than eight seconds".

The same control removes the noise nobody thinks about: a flag, a banner, a balloon arch and the reflection of your own lot lighting in a windscreen all move for a fraction of a second at a time.

Under 1 second

Reflections, wipers of passing cars, insects on the lens, a banner in wind. Removed by the minimum duration before anything is classified.

1 to 8 seconds

Somebody walking past on the pavement, a delivery driver turning around. Kept in the timeline, normally not an alert.

8 to 60 seconds

A person on the forecourt with a reason to be there, or without one. This is the band where the alert belongs.

Over 60 seconds

Someone stationary at a vehicle. On a dealership this is the event you bought cameras for, and it is one row in the timeline with a duration you can read.

03 What a lot costs to cover

Twelve cameras on a single site is $149 a month, and the cameras are already there.

A single franchise site, 12 cameras

Frontage, forecourt rows, service entrance, parts store, wash bay, compound

Operate, 15 cameras included $149 a month
Billed annually $119 a month, $1,428 a year
Per camera, per month $9.93
New cameras needed None
Webhook and Slack alerts Included

Group with several rooftops normally sits on Multi-Site: unlimited sites, 60 cameras, SSO and a one year audit log at $499 a month. Full table on the pricing page.

Setting it up on a lot

  1. Exclude zone at the kerb on every camera that sees the road. This is the change that does most of the work.
  2. Minimum duration of 8 seconds on frontage cameras, 1.5 seconds on the compound and the service entrance.
  3. Person alerts from close to opening, all night, on the whole site.
  4. Vehicle alerts only outside opening hours, and only inside the lot boundary.
  5. Route alerts to a phone overnight and to a channel during the day, so the duty manager is not the only path.
  6. Leave the wash bay and the valet area out of alerting entirely, and keep them in the timeline for the disputes.
04 Asked by dealer principals and group IT

Four questions specific to a dealership.

01

Can it read a number plate?

No. It classifies categories, so it reports vehicle, not a registration. Plate recognition is a separate class of product with its own legal footprint, and it is deliberately not part of this one.

02

Will it identify a specific person across visits?

No. There is no face template, no face matching and no re-identification of a person across cameras or across days. That is a product decision, and it is the sentence your group counsel will want.

03

What about the test drive that comes back after hours?

It will produce a vehicle event, correctly, because a vehicle did enter the lot at 21:40. Alerting is a rule you set, so most sites route vehicle events outside opening hours to a channel rather than to a phone, and keep person alerts on the phone.

04

We have nine rooftops. Is that nine subscriptions?

No. Multi-Site is unlimited sites and 60 cameras at $499 a month, which covers most groups of that size. Above 60 cameras it is an Enterprise conversation, by email, with a price you can put in a purchase order.

Draw one zone at the kerb and see what is left.

One email address, one 6 digit code, and your console opens. Pick the tier that matches your camera count and pay by card.