Patent ID: 8558885

Claim:
A method for detecting an obstruction in a pathway of a moveable barrier, the method comprising: at a first time: receiving and recording visual inputs from and representative of a physical visual indicator via a camera having a field of view, the field of view comprising both an area to protect and an area to ignore, wherein the physical visual indicator defines an indicated area within the field of view that corresponds to at least one of the area to protect and the area to ignore, the indicated area having a fixed location which has been visually defined by a user within the field of view, the at least one of the area to protect and the area to ignore being in proximity to a moveable barrier which is configured to be moved by a movable barrier operator having a controller programmed to move the barrier; evaluating the visual inputs from the physical visual indicator to determine the location of the indicated area within the field of view; separating the field of view into the area to protect and the area to ignore; determining a fixed evaluation area using the inputs representative of the physical visual indicator of the field of view that coincides with substantially only the area to protect; defining a mask indicating the area to ignore and storing the mask in a memory; at a second time: retrieving the mask from the memory; receiving an image of the field of view from the camera without the physical visual indicator; applying the mask to the image to mask out objects that are located outside the fixed evaluation area but within the field of view of the camera without the presence of the physical visual indicator used to define the indicated area; and determining whether an obstruction exists in the fixed evaluation area of the camera defined by the mask without the presence of the physical visual indicator used to define the indicated area and ignoring obstructions within the field of view but outside the fixed evaluation area.