Exclusion Zones
Exclusion zones let you silence motion you never care about: a busy road at the edge of frame, a flag, a swaying tree. This guide shows how to draw and manage zones for a camera in the web app.
What exclusion zones do
Section titled “What exclusion zones do”An exclusion zone is a masked region of a camera’s field of view. Detections that fall inside an active exclusion zone are ignored during classification, so predictable, harmless motion in a known part of the frame stops generating alarms.
Use exclusion zones when a specific area of a camera view is a consistent source of false positives: the classic cases are traffic along a road at the top of frame, vegetation moving in the wind, or a flag. Rather than repeatedly labeling those results as false positives, you mask the region once and the noise goes away.
Zones are defined per camera: each camera has its own set of zones tied to its identity, and they only apply to that camera’s classifications.
Prerequisites
Section titled “Prerequisites”- A camera that has recorded at least one video. The zone editor draws zones on top of a still from the camera’s footage, so a camera with no footage yet cannot be edited: you will see a message that a zone backdrop appears once the camera has recorded footage.
- Access to the Sites section of the web app.
Open the zone editor
Section titled “Open the zone editor”-
Go to Sites and open the site, then the camera you want to configure.
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Select Edit zone on the camera. This opens the zone editor at
/sites/<siteId>/camera/<cameraId>/zones.
The editor has two panes: the camera view on the left, where you draw and adjust zones, and the Exclusion zones panel on the right, which lists every zone on the camera.
Draw a zone
Section titled “Draw a zone”-
In the Exclusion zones panel, select the add (+) button to start a new zone.
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Draw the region on the camera view to cover the area you want to mask. Adjust its shape directly on the still until it fits the area.
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The new zone appears in the panel as a numbered Scenario, enabled by default.
Each zone is called a Scenario because a zone can carry activation rules, not just a shape: see Scheduling a zone below.
Manage zones
Section titled “Manage zones”Every zone in the panel has a toggle, a delete control, and an expandable detail section.
Enable, disable, and status
Section titled “Enable, disable, and status”Use the toggle on each zone to enable or disable it. A zone reports one of three states:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| enabled | The zone is on and currently masking its region. |
| idle | The zone is on but outside its scheduled window, so it is not masking right now. |
| disabled | The zone is off and has no effect. |
Disable a zone to turn it off temporarily without losing its shape or settings; delete it (the trash control) to remove it permanently.
Scheduling a zone
Section titled “Scheduling a zone”Expand a zone and open its Settings tab to restrict when it is active. This is useful when a region is only a nuisance at certain times: for example, masking a car park during working hours but not overnight. You can combine:
- Hour: a start and end time of day.
- Date: a start and end date range.
- Week days: the specific days of the week the zone applies.
When a zone is enabled but the current time falls outside its schedule, it shows as idle and does not mask its region until the next active window.
Zone information
Section titled “Zone information”The Information tab on each zone records who created it, when, and who last modified it: useful for auditing changes when several operators share a camera.