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Aktualisiert am 19. September 2026

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Surveillance Station motion detection is the difference between a camera that tells you something happened and a camera that sends you four hundred notifications about a tree. Almost every false-alarm complaint comes down to two numbers, sensitivity Und threshold, and most people adjust the wrong one. This guide explains what each setting actually does, gives three tested starting points for home, office and outdoor cameras, and shows when you should stop tuning Surveillance Station motion detection altogether and switch to AI person and vehicle detection instead.

SynoPower Club-Punkt: The most common mistake we see is turning sensitivity down to stop false alarms. That usually breaks the recordings you actually need. A person walking across a dark driveway is a small, slow, low-contrast change, which is exactly what low sensitivity throws away. Raise the threshold or shrink the detection area first, and leave sensitivity high.

What the two motion detection settings actually do #

These two motion detection settings are not two strengths of the same dial. They answer different questions, and that is why changing them at random rarely helps.

Sensitivity: how faint a change still counts as movement #

Sensitivity decides how much a pixel has to change in brightness or colour before the camera calls it motion. It is the entry gate of the whole motion detection pipeline. High sensitivity catches a shadow crossing a wall at dusk. Low sensitivity ignores it, but it will also ignore a person in dark clothing walking past a dark fence.

Threshold: how much of the detection area has to change at once #

Threshold decides how widespread that change has to be before recording starts. It is expressed as a proportion of the detection area, so a threshold of 10 means roughly a tenth of the area you selected must change at the same moment. Threshold is the motion detection setting that separates a bird from a car, because a bird occupies a tiny fraction of the frame and a car does not.

Should sensitivity be set high or low? #

In almost every real motion detection installation, sensitivity should be high and threshold should be the number you tune. Keeping sensitivity high means the camera still sees the faint, slow, badly lit events that matter most, while the threshold filters out anything too small to care about. Lowering sensitivity does the opposite: it makes the camera blind to subtle movement first, which is the movement you most want on tape.

The one case for lowering sensitivity is a scene with constant light flicker, such as a room lit by a failing fluorescent tube or a view that includes a screen or a reflection on water. There, no threshold will save you and the brightness changes themselves are the problem.

Where the Surveillance Station motion detection settings live #

Open Surveillance Station, go to IP Kamera, select the camera, choose Bearbeiten and open the Event Detection tab. The first choice on that tab shapes your whole motion detection behaviour, and it matters more than any slider below it:

Detection source: By Camera. The camera does the analysis itself and simply tells the NAS when something happened. This costs the NAS almost no CPU and is the right choice for most systems, especially once you are running more than a handful of cameras.
Detection source: By Surveillance Station. The NAS decodes and analyses the video stream itself. It gives you more settings and a consistent interface across mixed camera brands, but every camera set this way adds real CPU load on the NAS.

Which sliders you see depends on that choice, so if a setting described below is missing on your screen, check the detection source first. The clip here shows the detection settings on a Synology BC500.

Adjusting Surveillance Station motion detection on a Synology BC500 camera

Motion detection setup in 4 steps #

If you only change four things, change these. Each step is explained in more depth in the sections above and below.

Open the camera’s event detection settings #

In Surveillance Station open IP Camera, select the camera, choose Edit and open the Event Detection tab. This is where every detection type for that camera lives, motion detection included.

Choose where detection runs #

Set the detection source to By Camera so the camera analyses its own video, or By Surveillance Station so the NAS does it. By Camera costs the NAS almost no CPU and is the better default; By Surveillance Station gives more settings and one consistent interface across brands. This choice determines which sliders you see next.

Set sensitivity high and tune the threshold #

Leave sensitivity high, around 80 to 90, so the camera still sees faint and slow movement. Then raise the threshold until small events stop triggering: 5 to 10 indoors, 10 to 15 for an office entrance, 15 to 25 outdoors. Never use 50 or 70 outdoors, because a car crossing a driveway will never change that much of the frame.

Draw the detection area, then test for a full day #

Mask out the sky, trees, a public pavement and any neighbour’s window, which removes more false alarms than any slider. Then leave the camera alone for twenty-four hours and judge the result from the recorded timeline rather than from memory, because most false alarms are tied to a specific time of day.

Three Surveillance Station motion detection setups that work #

Treat these as starting points, not final answers. Set them, leave the motion detection running for a full day and night, then look at what the recordings actually caught before you change anything. Tuning from memory instead of from the timeline is how people end up with cameras that record nothing.

One warning before the numbers. You will find guides, including an earlier version of this page, that suggest thresholds of 50 or 70 for outdoor cameras. Those values are far too high. A threshold of 70 means seventy per cent of the detection area has to change at the same instant, and a car driving up a normal driveway never comes close to that. Cameras set that way look like they are working and quietly record nothing at all.

Home camera: hallway, entrance or living room #

Goal: motion detection that catches everything, including someone moving slowly or staying near the edge of the frame.

Empfindlichkeit: 90
Schwelle: 5 to 10

Indoors the light is stable and there is no wind, so you can afford to be greedy. A low threshold is safe here because nothing in a closed room moves unless a person or a pet makes it move. If a pet is the problem, raise the threshold a few points rather than dropping sensitivity.

Office camera: the entrance, not the desks #

Goal: record people arriving and leaving without recording eight hours of ordinary desk activity.

Empfindlichkeit: 70 to 80
Schwelle: 10 to 15

The real motion detection fix in an office is not the threshold at all, it is the detection area. Mask out the desks and keep only the doorway and the corridor leading to it. A well drawn mask does more here than any slider, and it also removes most of the privacy objections that come with filming staff at work.

Outdoor camera: driveway, yard or garden #

Goal: record people and vehicles while ignoring rain, branches, birds and insects.

Empfindlichkeit: 80
Schwelle: 15 to 25
Object size: raise it until a bird no longer qualifies

Outdoor scenes are where pixel-based motion detection struggles most of all, because wind, weather and changing daylight all look like movement. If your camera supports AI person and vehicle detection, this is the scene where you should stop tuning these numbers and use it instead.

Object size and detection area beat both sliders #

When the detection source is set to Surveillance Station, you usually get two further motion detection controls that solve more problems than sensitivity and threshold combined.

Object size sets how large a moving object must be relative to the frame. This is the cleanest way to ignore birds and insects, because it filters on size rather than on how much the object stands out. Insects crawling on the lens at night are the classic case, and no threshold value will fix them.
History, sometimes shown as duration, sets how long the movement must persist before it counts. Setting it to a second or two removes lightning, headlight sweeps and camera auto-exposure jumps, all of which are over almost instantly.

Above all of them sits the detection area. Surveillance Station lets you paint a grid over the image and only the selected cells are watched. Excluding the sky, a public pavement, a neighbour’s window and any tree from the mask usually cuts false alarms more than every numeric setting on the page, and it costs nothing in detection quality because you were never going to act on movement in those regions anyway.

On Synology cameras, use AI detection instead #

Everything above describes pixel-change motion detection, which is a technique from a time when cameras could not tell what they were looking at. Synology’s own cameras can. The BC500 and TC500, and the newer BC510, TC510, BC800Z Und CC410W, run people and vehicle detection on the camera itself and report those events to Surveillance Station.

That changes the question the system is answering. Instead of asking whether enough pixels changed, it asks whether a person is present. Rain, branches and headlights do not look like people, so they stop generating events without you having to tune anything. You can then build Surveillance Station action rules on the person or vehicle event rather than on raw motion, which is what makes notifications worth reading again.

This runs on the camera, so it does not require a Deep Video Analytics NAS. If you are choosing cameras now and the location is outdoors, on-camera AI detection is worth more than any specification on the box.

Seven causes of motion detection false alarms #

Before changing any motion detection number, check whether one of these is the real cause. Each has a fix that works better than a slider.

Spiders and insects on the lens at night. The single most common outdoor cause. Infrared light attracts insects, which then appear enormous because they are centimetres from the lens. Raise object size, and move or shield the IR illuminator if the camera allows it.
The day and night switch. When the camera flips to infrared the entire image changes at once, which trips any threshold. A history or duration setting of a second or more absorbs it.
Rain and snow lit by infrared. Each drop reflects light straight back. Angle the camera down slightly, use the detection area to exclude the brightest part of the IR cone, and raise object size.
Trees, shrubs and washing lines. Exclude them with the detection area rather than raising the threshold, so the rest of the scene keeps its sensitivity.
Headlights sweeping a wall. Mask the wall, or switch to vehicle detection if the camera supports it.
Flickering or failing lights. This is the one case where lowering sensitivity is the correct answer.
Nothing recorded at all. If events appear in the log but no video exists, the problem is usually recording schedule or storage, not detection. Check that continuous or motion recording is scheduled for that hour before touching the detection tab.

Does Surveillance Station motion detection need a license? #

No. Motion detection, the other event detection types, the detection area editor and the action rules that act on them are all part of Surveillance Station and cost nothing extra. A Surveillance Station-Lizenz pays for a recording channel, not for a feature. Every Synology NAS includes two camera licenses, so two cameras can use everything on this page without any purchase at all.

Licenses only enter the picture when you add a third camera. Note that the older BC500 and TC500 shipped with a device license included, while the BC510, TC510, BC800Z and CC410W released in 2026 each consume a license like any other camera. If you are planning the total cost of a system, our guide on Was Surveillance Station kostenlos beinhaltet covers where the free tier ends, and the full Surveillance Station overview covers the rest of the system.

Frequently asked questions about motion detection #

What is the difference between motion detection and event detection? #

Event detection is the tab that holds every detection type for a camera, and motion detection is one of them. Depending on the model you may also find audio detection, tampering detection, and people or vehicle detection on the same tab. They can be enabled independently, and each can trigger its own action rule.

Should motion detection run on the camera or on Surveillance Station? #

Prefer the camera. It keeps NAS CPU free, which matters once you pass roughly four to six cameras, and it avoids a second decode of every stream. Use detection by Surveillance Station when the camera’s own detection is poor, or when you want one consistent set of controls across cameras from several brands.

Why does my camera record nothing even though motion is detected? #

Detection and recording are configured separately. Check the recording schedule for that camera and confirm that motion-triggered recording is enabled for the hours in question, then check that the storage volume still has free space and that the retention policy has not already deleted the clip.

Does motion detection work while I am watching a live view on my phone? #

Yes. Detection and recording run on the NAS and the camera regardless of who is watching. Live viewing adds a stream, but it does not change what gets recorded.

How long should I wait before judging a new motion detection setting? #

A full twenty-four hours. Most false alarms are tied to a time of day, such as the infrared switch at dusk, low sun in the morning or insects after dark. A setting that looks perfect at two in the afternoon can produce hundreds of events the same night.

Should sensitivity be high or low to reduce false alarms? #

High, in almost every case. Lowering sensitivity makes the camera blind to faint, slow and badly lit movement first, which is exactly the movement worth recording. Raise the threshold or shrink the detection area instead. The one exception is a scene with constant light flicker, where lowering sensitivity is the correct answer.

Does motion detection need a Surveillance Station license? #

No. Motion detection, the detection area editor and the action rules built on them are all included. A license pays for a recording channel, so it governs how many cameras you can connect rather than which features you may use. Every Synology NAS includes two camera licenses.

Why does my outdoor camera trigger every night but not during the day? #

Almost always insects drawn to the infrared illuminator. An insect centimetres from the lens fills a large part of the frame, so it passes any threshold. Raise the object size setting, and move or shield the illuminator if the camera allows it. Rain and snow lit by infrared produce the same pattern.

Where can I see motion detection set up on video? #

Three walkthroughs that cover Surveillance Station setup including the detection tab. They are third-party tutorials rather than Synology productions, so interface details may differ slightly from your version.