Prediction Feature

The Motion Guide author has only very little experience with the feature. At the moment all Motion can do is report recognition as a "Best Guess: Prediction_name value" on the console. Ie. it cannot do anything in Daemon mode. Prediction is controlled by the new 'predict_enable', predict_description' and 'predict_threshold' config file options. This is really experimental code that needs some further work. Once the prediction is working there are many funny features it can be used for where motion can take actions/run scripts/save pictures depending on the kind of motion detected.

These are Jeroen own words for the feature.

prediction is a little experiment I have been doing over the past days... Using 'description files' that describe a movement. Motion tries to predict what it was that triggered it. At the moment motion can distinguish between me sitting at the computer, me walking out of the room and me walking into the room. A description is outputted for each event (.desc files). Motion will load files mentioned with 'predict_description' in the config file. These files have three lines: a line with the title, a line with the minimum values and a line with the maximum values. The current version is very rude..... try it, but don't expect to much

HOWTO make a description file:

1. wait for an event to create a .desc file e.g.:
   • walk in front of the camera
   • /2002/07/02/232300.desc is created
   • copy it to walk.desc
   • edit it: prepend a line with title 'walk
   • copy the existing line to get two identical lines
   • add 'predict_description walk.desc' to the config file
   • start motion
2. wait for some more events.
3. If you have similar events combine them:
   • ./combine walk.desc /2002/07/02/235500.desc
   • restart motion again.
   • Do this several times to get a description that matches better with new events.

The combine program that Jeroen talks about is included in the Motion 3.1.10+ distribution both as a Intel-386 binary and as source. To build this little application from source simply run this command.

gcc -o combine combine.c

This creates the combine binary in the Motion directory.

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Sep 2004