Microsoft has upgraded the motion-detection features of Azure Media Services, the company said in a blog post today.
Rather than detecting motion only on a full screen, applications can be made to detect within simple polygons drawn onto the screen. For example, if a camera is trained on a garage and house, the app can limit motion detection to the garage door and the driveway leading up to it, so that dogs running through the yard won’t activate it.
Sensitivity can now be controlled, set to one of three levels. And events occurring within a specified time span of each other can be merged into a single event. That means, for example, that each car passing a camera won’t trigger recording.
Microsoft also announced the availability on GitHub of an open-source project that Azure users can employ to track their usage and billing of multiple Azure services, a process that the company acknowledged can be complex. The project is a multi-piece offering that requires some assembly, leading commenters on the Microsoft blog post to ask why it could not be made simpler and more integrated into the system.
