My Driveway Camera Sent Me 40 Alerts Per Hour. Detection Zones Fixed That in 10 Minutes.

What Frigate Detection Zones Actually Are

A zone is a polygon you draw on the camera frame. It’s a set of coordinates that defines a region of the image. Frigate can then be configured to only fire notification events when a detection — person, car, animal, whatever you’ve set up — appears within that polygon.

The important thing to understand: Frigate still tracks and records everything outside the zone. The AI keeps running on the full frame. Events are stored. But notifications only fire for detections inside the zones you care about. So you get complete recording coverage without getting pinged every time a car passes ten feet outside your property line.

How to Set Up Zones in config.yaml

Frigate has a built-in zone editor in the UI. Go to your camera settings and find the Zones section — you can draw directly on the live camera feed. Click to add polygon points, close the shape, and Frigate gives you a coordinate array you paste into config.yaml. Don’t try to calculate these manually from screenshots; the UI editor handles resolution math for you.

A basic zone setup in config.yaml looks like this:

cameras:
  driveway:
    zones:
      package_area:
        coordinates: 152,871,519,871,519,540,152,540
        objects:
          - person
      front_yard:
        coordinates: 0,1080,1920,1080,1920,380,0,380
        objects:
          - person
          - car

Coordinates are x,y pairs relative to your camera resolution. package_area here only watches for people (not vehicles) because no car is going to reach my front doorstep. front_yard watches for both. If I want to go further and make it so notifications only fire when a detection overlaps a zone, I use required_zones:

cameras:
  driveway:
    mqtt:
      required_zones:
        - package_area
        - front_yard

With required_zones set, if a car drives past on the road and never enters front_yard, nothing fires. No event is generated, no notification is sent. The camera still records the car — the clip is there if you go looking — but it doesn’t land in your notification feed.

What Zone Names Look Like on iPhone

This is where Lumen comes in. When Frigate fires an event with zone metadata, Lumen receives the zone name as part of that event data and surfaces it in the notification and event list. The notification that hits my iPhone no longer just says “Person detected at driveway.” It says “Person detected in package_area at driveway.”

That extra context completely changes how I respond to alerts. “Person in package_area” means someone is standing at my front door step — that’s worth opening the app right now. “Person in front_yard” means someone is approaching the house. “Vehicle in front_yard” at 2am is a completely different kind of alert than a generic “vehicle detected” with no location context. I went from guessing to knowing before I even tap the notification.

Filtering the Event Timeline by Zone in Lumen

Lumen’s event timeline lets you filter by zone name. If I want to see every delivery that came to my door this week, I open the driveway camera feed, filter to package_area, and scroll through a clean list of clips. Every time someone approached the door. When it was. What the snapshot looks like. The road traffic isn’t there at all.

This sounds like a minor convenience and it isn’t. Before zones, reviewing my camera’s event history meant paging through hundreds of entries to find the three that mattered. After zones, the filter does that work for me. The zone names I put in config.yaml — front_yard, package_area, garage_approach — show up exactly as typed in the Lumen event list. Using underscores makes them read cleanly.

The Actual Numbers

Before setting up zones, my driveway camera generated roughly 35–40 events per hour during daylight. That’s 800–900 events over 24 hours. Of those, maybe 15–20 were about activity that actually touched my property. The rest were street traffic, passersby, and neighborhood movement that I had zero reason to care about.

After front_yard and package_area with required_zones: I now get 15–25 events per day from that camera, and essentially all of them are about something that entered the property. My notification count from that single camera dropped by roughly 97%. I stopped dismissing them without looking. That ratio flip — from “mostly ignore” to “mostly relevant” — is the actual benefit of zones.

The Three Zones I Actually Use

Here’s my real setup on the driveway camera, not hypothetical examples:

• package_area — a tight polygon around my front door step, person-only. Fires whenever someone is standing at the door. This is my highest-priority zone because someone at the door always matters.
• front_yard — the property from the sidewalk edge to the house, people and vehicles. Covers anyone approaching rather than just passing by.
• garage_approach — the driveway path from street to garage, vehicle-only. Fires when a car turns in rather than just driving past. No person detection here because that’s covered by front_yard already.

I deliberately don’t have a street zone. If I included the street in a zone, I’d be back to alerting on passing traffic. The whole point of required_zones is that anything outside my defined zones is silent. The street stays silent.

A Note on Zone Objects

The objects key under a zone lets you filter which object types generate events in that zone. If you leave it out, all tracked object classes apply. But being specific helps. My garage_approach zone only watches for cars because I don’t need a person alert for someone walking up the driveway — front_yard already covers that. Setting object types per zone prevents double-notification for the same event.

One other thing worth knowing: zones don’t affect recording. Whatever Frigate records is determined by your motion and object detection settings, not your zones. Zones only affect which detections generate MQTT events — and therefore which events Lumen receives and notifies you about. The full recording is always there if you need it.

The Difference It Made

I’ve been running zones for about two months and they’re one of the first things I’d set up on any new Frigate install now. A camera pointed at a street without zones is basically unusable as a notification source — the volume makes the alerts meaningless. With zones, the same camera tells me something real every time my phone buzzes. The configuration took ten minutes, the payoff has been every day since.

If you’re dismissing Frigate alerts without looking at them, zones are probably the fix. Not a new camera, not a different angle — just telling Frigate which part of the frame you actually care about.