My point is that a 'properly' set VMD daytime setting will always be plagued with the false alarms of the night time variety - based largely on the general unevenness of lighting that occurs. i.e. headlight beams that fall in a field of view will change pixels, even if the headlights or the vehicle itself is off screen. Motion event.
"it's addressing the more general case of adjusting the parameters to their ideal settings when trying to account for occasional events that are not easily duplicated."
VMD is the weakest of analytics - it simply notes pixel change.
Regardless of how or why this pixel change occurs (shadows, cats, etc) VMD is unable to distinguish anything beyond the fact that pixels have changed.
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"So everytime it happened I bumped the sensitivity down a little bit until it didn't trigger anymore. I then had to test with larger objects to make sure it was still sensitive enough to get those.
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Needless to say this took several weeks/events to get right."
I do not accept this conclusion. There is no 'right' that can cover both. You can only 'bump down' the sensitivity until it ignores anything the same size or smaller than the cat. As VMD sensitivity is basically lowering or raising the 'percentage of pixel change' levels, this solution fails when a 2% larger cat creeps down the walkway to your house.
To avoid the neighborhood cat - or any of his heftier buddies - from setting off a motion alert, you would need to teach the system what a cat is first, and then command it to ignore cats.
The obvious solution to the creeping cat dilemma is video analytics. Not sure if there are cat-specific VA though.
I don't think there is an answer to the OPs dilemma unless he/she could somehow teach the system to ignore whatever it is that his/her system is alarming on during those off hours.
In my experience, VMD sensitivity is 'tuned' as best as possible taking into consideration resolution and how wide the FoV is - and lighting. If lighting changes throughout the day and night then you need different VMD sensitivity settings (i.e. schedules) if you don't want the unevenness of night time lighting changes to set off motion alerts based on your 'correct' day time settings.