ONVIF Notifications and ZoneMinder

ONVIF triggers external events in ZoneMinder

I finally put together everything I had learned about ZoneMinder external event triggering and ONVIF VideoAnalytics.

The result is a script zmonvif-trigger.pl that subscribes to events from several ONVIF cameras. The cameras send these events if something moves in their view field.

On reception of an ONVIF event the script generates a ZoneMinder event. Thus the ZoneMinder server does not need to analyze the video streams from several cameras. The cameras themselves watch for any movement. This saves a lot of CPU power and network bandwidth.

ONVIF Notifications

Having defined a motion detector rule I now want to receive notifications from my ONVIF ip camera.

ONVIF uses the WS-Notification standard for event distribution. This standard defines a publish-subscribe model that uses SOAP web service messages.

ONVIF Analytics

I wanted to explore more features of my webcam (TV-IP311PI). Apart from probing and streaming it can also do “video analytics”. That is the ONVIF name for motion detection.

From a system architecture point of view, it makes more sense to have each camera analyse its own view field and only then send image data. If we have a central system analysing data from many  cameras the data volume is much larger. Obviously the central system needs to receive image streams from all cameras in order to analyse them.