Tuning motion detection

Exclusion zones

If a specific part of a camera's frame reliably produces false triggers, a tree branch, a street corner, a flag, draw an exclusion zone directly on the live image in the admin console's motion tuner. Motion inside an excluded zone is ignored entirely for that camera. This is almost always a better fix than raising a sensitivity threshold across the whole frame, since it targets the specific nuisance region without also making the detector less sensitive to a real event happening elsewhere in the same shot.

Adaptive threshold

Rather than a single fixed sensitivity number, each camera's detector learns its own normal background activity level from a rolling history of recent frames, including a per-hour-of-day profile, so a driveway that sees passing headlights at night and shifting shadows at midday settles on a different effective floor for each, without manual retuning as conditions change. This adapts over hours to days of runtime; a brand new camera hasn't learned its scene yet, which is part of why starting new cameras on Continuous (or Motion with shadow mode) until the detector has settled in is the recommended path, see Recording modes.

"False motion" that isn't a bug

Trees, moving shadows, and a busy street are common sources of what looks like a false trigger but is, technically, real pixel motion. The fix for that class of nuisance is an exclusion zone (if it's a fixed region of the frame) or an object detector via Frigate as a source (if you want detection gated on "was this actually a person," not just "did pixels change"), not chasing a lower sensitivity threshold that will also make the camera miss real events.