New and Updated Features Released Today!

[Saralyn]

If you follow the Meraki blog, you may have already seen the news, but we released several new and updated features today for MV cameras. Included in this update are: 

• Vehicle detection: MV72 (our outdoor camera) now has the ability to detect both people, and vehicles. Vehicle count information will be displayed along side people count information on the analytics tab for each camera. It will also be available via the MV Sense API. 
• New Motion Alert Options: Configure multiple areas of interest, and specify motion sensitivity to make alerts more granular. You'll also see a new graph displaying the expected average daily alerts based on your configuration.
• Timeline Navigation Changes: Zoom in and out or back and forth using your mouse or touchpad. When hovering over the timeline, scrolling with a mouse wheel or swiping up or down on a touchpad will zoom in and out. You can go backward or forward in the timeline by swiping left or right, or using shift+scroll on a mouse wheel. 
• Camera FoV in Maps: Cameras placed on a map or floor plan will now have a cone or circular (for MV32) field of view indicator.

• 12 Hour Exports: The maximum length for an exported video clip has been increased to 12 hours. 

What are you most excited about? I know that the Motion Alert improvements were some of our most requested features, and some of the members in our SE organization have had some fun building out cool solutions with the new vehicle detection model. Let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more in the next few weeks!

[PhilipDAth]

I'm really interested in the vehicle detection - but all my customers interested in this have MV12s.

They are all under cover drive throughs and warehouse style operations.  None of them have externally mounted cameras.

Do you think it will be brought to the MV12, or does the MV72 have some extra "punch" to allow it to do this?

[BlakeRichardson]

Vehicle detection sounds awesome, next step license plate detection please!!!!!

[Saralyn]

Hi @BlakeRichardson! It's possible to do license plate recognition now using a combination of MV Sense and the Snapshot API. One of our own SE's built a demo of this in WebEx Teams using OpenALPR (though I'm sure there are other solutions that offer similar services.) 

MV Sense and the Snapshot API really provide the flexible framework for a wide range of custom solutions that we don't support in-house. It also allows you to analyze only the high value data - images containing people or vehicles - instead of having to handle all the raw video data. The snapshot below is another example of an in-house solution built in WebEx teams - it's detecting and labeling different objects, and reading text. 

[wvmtneer]

Hello.  I am also interested in the vehicle count.  We have the outdoor cameras at fuel terminals and in some locations would like to see a vehicle count versus a person count to track access.  Also we have cameras in each lane of loading rack and this can give a quick count of traffic for the day.

[PhilipDAth]

@Saralyn  could you ask the SE to join this conversation?

I would like to do something similar, but it is not obvious specifically which API calls I should be making.

[Saralyn]

Hi @PhilipDAth - thanks for the response! Drive-thrus and warehouses are definitely interesting use cases for vehicle detection. Do you know how your customers would want to use the vehicle detection information in these scenarios? I'd suggest making a wish in the dashboard, and/or talking to your Meraki rep about a feature request for it. 

[PhilipDAth]

My customers would be interested in two use cases:

* Simple analytics - simply being able to report on the size of the queue of waiting vehicles by hour of the day.

* Being able to do number plate recognition.  This could be used for banned customers, customers known to be violent and customers known to be abusive.

[BlakeRichardson]

@PhilipDAth  "This could be used for banned customers, customers known to be violent and customers known to be abusive." That sounds like customers getting angry they cant buy their McNuggets..... People get so angry over the silliest of things

[Priesty]

I usually get angry after eating McNuggets... as I lose all self-respect.

[Evangel]

Check out Plate Recognizer ALPR  for a free trial for your project