Areas of Interest for Motion-Based Retention - Another Wish Granted!

[Saralyn]

Previously, I posted about a "wish" made by @GeorgeB  that came true when we released Scheduled Exports. This week, we made a non-Meraki employee's wish come true by improving our motion-based retention feature. 

This wish came from a user named Bernard, and he requested a way to exclude motion in certain areas of being retained for the purposes of motion-based retention. The example he gave was being able to ignore things like trees blowing in the wind, or a busy road. This type of near-constant motion can have the potential of dramatically reducing the storage capacity for more interesting, or potentially important, footage. 

To help users like Bernard, we've added the ability to select areas of interest for motion-based retention. The selection tool works similarly to areas of interest for motion alert - simply click and drag to choose the areas that are important to you. This could be entrances and exits, or maybe areas that contain high value equipment.

Using areas of interest to ignore motion events outside the balcony

In the Meraki office, we used this feature on our stairwell cameras to ignore movement from hanging decorations, and on a balcony camera to discard movement happening on the ground below. With the area of interest feature, we were able to increase expected retention by 40% on the stairwell cameras, and an incredible 260% on the balcony camera (pictured above). 

To learn more about motion based retention and areas of interest, check out our documentation. We'd love to hear what you think about areas of interest! Do you have cameras installed in challenging motion environments, and is this feature able to improve the camera's retention? And of course, I have to ask - what's the next "wish" you'd like to see granted?

[PhilipDAth]

Oh I can use this straight away!

I have a camera that can see a road outside of the building through a window.  The road is busy, and it makes the camera record for a lot of the 24 hour day.  Excluding the road through the window will greatly extend the retention time available.

[Saralyn]

@PhilipDAth That's great! Our balcony camera picked up a bit of the road too, so it was always seeing motion from cars and people. Hopefully you can see some good improvements in retention, too!

[MerakiDave]

Same here, on my MV72, by selecting an area of interest for motion based retention, the retention estimate went from roughly 31 days to 55 days, nearly double.  Another great example that wishes do matter, keep them coming!

[PhilipDAth]

ps. It is good to mention a wish being actioned.  To a whole lot of people it feels like they go into a great void.

Now we know the odds are more like winning Lotto or being struck by lightening.  🙂

[MerakiDave]

LoL.  And yes I have been suggesting internally we should become more transparent with wishes.  At present there is no feedback and my suggestion is to demystify it somewhat, just to prove they don't go into the bit bucket.  Every wish has a unique ID and is logged/archived, goes through a wish analytics engine that takes certain factors into account like keywords and which page it was made from.  So wishes are categorized and correlated and do make it to the product teams which gives them another input into prioritization efforts.  

[BrechtSchamp]

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@PhilipDAth wrote:

Now we know the odds are more like winning Lotto or being struck by lightening.  🙂

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🤣

[BlakeRichardson]

Yes... take that annoying tree that increases my capture time!!!!!

[GeorgeB]

For at least the MV team, we read every single wish, every single day. 

One pro tip on wishing, please say "why" you're wishing. So many of our internal wish conversations start "Why do they want this, or what are they trying to do?"