How Insula scouts a yard, locks on, and decides someone has stepped into a zone

Insula drives a pan, tilt and zoom camera. A fixed camera records whatever happens to pass through its view. A camera that moves has to decide where to look, what to follow, and when to give up, and each of those decisions is a rule that can be written down. These are the ones Insula uses.

Scout, lock, and give up

With nobody in view, the camera sweeps the yard on its own. That is scouting. When it finds a person it locks on and follows. If it loses that person for 30 seconds, it goes back to scouting.

Any timeout like this trades two failures against each other. A short one sends the camera away the moment someone steps behind a tree. A long one leaves it staring at an empty spot while something else happens elsewhere in the yard.

How much of the picture a person gets

In People mode the face is given 22 percent of the frame height. A person who is moving gets at least 1 m of margin around them, so a step forward does not put them out of frame before the camera has caught up.

The auto-track setting chooses what the camera follows: Off, People, Vehicles or Plates. A fifth choice, Multi, follows people or vehicles, whichever is there, and sends vehicles on a hunt for their plate.

Insula reads plates on parked cars as well as moving ones. For a vehicle whose plate it cannot read, it records the colour and a likely model instead.

Taking control by hand

You can override the automatic behaviour at any moment, on the live picture:

Tap a person

and the camera pans, tilts and zooms to keep them framed.

Tap anywhere else

and it centres that point.

Draw a box

and the lens zooms to it. Pinching works too.

Save a preset

and tap its name later to return to that view.

Zones

A zone is a shape on the picture, and it can be made two ways. You can walk the zone's outline and the camera follows your footsteps to draw it, or you can click its corners on the picture.

Each zone is armed on a schedule, so the same part of the yard can be ignored during the day and watched at night.

The rule for when a zone counts as occupied uses feet, not the whole body. A person whose feet are inside an armed zone makes it occupied. Using feet avoids two mistakes a bounding box makes. A tall person leaning over a line is not inside it, and a person in front of a zone, whose head overlaps it in the picture, has not entered it.

When a zone becomes occupied, Insula records an event and sets a HomeKit sensor, so the rest of the house can react: a light can come on or a notification can go out. On a desktop, a notification arrives with a live snapshot from the camera.

Putting it together

Scouting finds a person, locking keeps them in frame at a size that makes a face readable, recognition decides whether they are known, and zones decide whether it matters that they are there. Because each stage has its own rule, an unexpected alert can be traced to the stage that produced it.

Watch the preview film on the Insula page. Insula is in preview and free, and the reasoning behind its face matching is in the post on thresholds.

Written by Caisson AI. Questions or corrections go to hello@caissonai.co.