video motion detection is useless in this area IMO. Once it starts snowing, it will just keep triggering 24/7, for 6 months
Not if you tune it properly. As I have already stated...once I tuned mine, I NEVER had a false trip in 8 months (Some summer, fall and heavy winter (we had a blizzard in Utica, where I used to live)).
Again, I used to design this kind of hardware for a living. It's VERY possible. You just need to have the proper tuning controls over the video stream.
For example, some of these things are so smart, they can detect when someone sits down and leaves something behind (such as a bagged up bomb), loitering detection (someone is standing near something they shouldn't for too long), intention path detection (if someone is walking near something you don't want them in...it's OK, but if a certain pattern is detected (over many minutes) we consider that they are only walking near there to try to make it LOOK like they are there by accident...), etc. Some REALLY crazy stuff.
I'm using SuperVisionCam, it does color based masking (if you color something black, ALL colors in that area are ignored, if you color something blue, all things blue, green, yellow are ignored, but other colors can trip). It does dynamic presence calculations (so if it starts to snow, than there will be LOTS of small motion, which can be ignored, BUT if there are LOTS of LARGE motion (user defined what "large" is) that could be a bunch of people walking in and out of your house with stuff, so trip). Again, tuning for your specific area is the key. It's somewhat difficult, and takes time. I found the best thing was to just have a simple X10 thermal trigger on anything. Let the camera wake up (instant on), then start detection. I've captured Deer, but never my neighbor's cat fighting with a local fox.
--Dan
--Dan