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Self storage security cameras that alert on people, not on weather

A storage site is a large, dark, mostly empty property with a hundred moving metal doors. That is the worst possible input for pixel change detection, which is why the alerts got muted in the first month.
Run it on a clip
  • Keep the cameras on the aisles
  • Person and vehicle alerts after hours
  • 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.

6

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.

00 00:00.0

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.

Length
0.0s
Confidence
0%
Area
0.0%

0

Motion events found

0

Dropped by zone

0

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 Why storage sites break motion detection

Five things on your site move constantly, and none of them are worth an alert.

Storage cameras look down long corridors of corrugated steel under infrared. Steel reflects, doors flex in wind, and a drive aisle is open to a road. Your recorder is not malfunctioning when it sends forty alerts at 01:00: it is correctly reporting that pixels changed. It simply has no way to say that none of it was a person.

Classification is the part that fixes this, and it is the part your recorder does not have. The mechanism is written out on artificial intelligence video surveillance.

What moves What removes it
Roller doors flexing in wind Classified as other motion, and below a 1.5 second minimum duration it never becomes an event at all.
Headlights crossing the drive aisle An exclude zone at the kerb line, plus a vehicle class filter that is off between 18:00 and 06:00 unless the vehicle stops.
Gate lights and aisle lights cycling A whole frame brightness change is absorbed by the adaptive background model rather than read as motion.
Rain and snow through infrared Killed by erosion before grouping, and what survives is classified as other motion, not as a person.
Cats, foxes and birds in the aisles Classified as animal, which most operators route to the timeline and to nobody's phone.
02 The night you are actually paying for

Nothing happens for six hours. Then something does, and you want it in your hand in ninety seconds.

Time Class What the timeline says
22:14 vehicle Vehicle passes on the road behind the fence
23:02 other Door 118 flexes, 0.4s
01:47 vehicle Vehicle enters the gate and stops in aisle C
01:49 person Person leaves the vehicle and walks to a unit door
02:31 person Person returns to the vehicle carrying an item
02:33 vehicle Vehicle exits the gate
04:10 animal Animal crosses aisle A

This is a worked example of what a night on a storage site looks like once events are classified, written to show the shape of the output. It is not a customer's footage and it is not a measured result. The four rows in full ink are the ones that would have reached a phone with a person filter on after 22:00. The other three stay in the timeline.

Why the shape matters more than the count

Four alerts across a night is a channel a human being reads. Forty is a channel a human being mutes, and a muted channel is the failure that costs you the one incident you bought cameras for.

The second thing the timeline buys you is the morning after. Instead of scrubbing six hours of an empty aisle you open 01:47, and the whole sequence, arrival to exit, is six rows. That is the difference between an hour of review and ninety seconds.

More on camera analytics and review time

03 What it costs on a storage site

Run the arithmetic with your own camera count before you believe any of it.

A single site with 14 cameras

Gate, office, six drive aisles, four corridors, two perimeter

Operate, 15 cameras included $149 a month
Billed annually $119 a month, $1,428 a year
Per camera, per month $9.93
New hardware required None
At an enterprise anchor of about $100 a camera Roughly $1,400 a month

The enterprise figure is that market's published per camera positioning, not a quote we have seen. Ask for your own, and put it next to the video analytics software price on this site.

Setting it up on a storage site

  1. Start with the gate camera and the two busiest drive aisles. Three cameras is enough to know whether this works for you.
  2. Draw an exclude zone over the public road and over any neighbouring property in frame. Draw it at the kerb, not at the fence, so someone walking up to your gate is still an event.
  3. Set the minimum duration to 1.5 seconds. This alone removes almost all door flex and rain.
  4. Alert on person at all hours, and on vehicle only outside opening hours.
  5. Leave animal and other motion in the timeline and out of the alert channel.
  6. Give it one week, then look at what you dismissed and tighten the zones once.

Practise steps two to four in the demo, on a bundled clip or on one of your own.

04 Asked by storage operators

Four questions specific to a storage site.

01

Will it work on the cameras my installer put in five years ago?

If they speak ONVIF or RTSP, yes, and effectively every business IP camera sold in the last decade does. Older analogue cameras running into a hybrid recorder work too if the recorder can publish an RTSP stream, which most can. The details are on the RTSP software page.

02

Can it tell a tenant from an intruder?

No, and it will not try. It reports that a person was in aisle C at 01:49 for 44 seconds. Whether that person is a tenant with a legitimate reason is your call, made with the access log and the gate code. There is no face recognition here and there never will be.

03

What about the drive aisle that faces a public road?

Draw an exclude zone over the road. Events whose centroid falls inside it are dropped before anything alerts, and you can watch that happen live in the demo. That one polygon is usually the single biggest reduction on a storage site.

04

We have four sites. Does that change the price?

Watch covers one site, Operate covers three, and Multi-Site is unlimited sites and 60 cameras. Four sites at a handful of cameras each is normally Multi-Site at $499 a month, or $399 billed annually.

Point it at the gate camera first.

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