Alert algorithm missing obvious events and triggering on shadows

I got a Wyze Pan Tilt camera about ten days ago and am bewildered by the CAMPlus software. I have the camera looking out a window onto my driveway and set the detection zone to focus where I want it. The false alarm rate is very high and it fails to identify legitimate events. Additionally, it will pan out of the intended detection area chasing false leads and not always return to the area of interest.

Today it triggered multiple times on the shadow of a palm tree. It absolutely missed my gardener parking his truck in direct view of it. I’ve seen this before as well.

It is all on the SD card so there’s a record but the alert feature leaves a lot to be desired.

11:31am Palm tree shadow alert
11:46 am Truck arrives, no alert
Noon: Truck leaves, no alert
12:04pm Palm tree shadow alert
12:21pm Palm tree shadow alert
12:24pm Palm tree shadow alert
12:25 pm Palm tree shadow alert → Clearly there is no cooldown time involved

Is there something that I can do about the detection/alerting or is this camera only good for recording?

Is there a way to stop it from automatically following and just stare at an area?

There was a firmware update a couple of days ago so I should be current on the software: 4.10.6.241

I use an Android phone

Welcome to the forums! I’ll snip out some questions:

The cameras “motion detection” is actually the camera detecting pixel change, so light changes, shadows, headlights, along with normal movement of things will be detected by the camera as “pixel change”. Best way to cut down on false positives is to re-evaluate your mounting point, change sensitivity settings, change detection zone settings, etc. I’ll touch on this below.

Yep, that’s good. I use my cloud notifications as a quick glimpse as to what just or is happening, then visit playback to get the full story if need be. All but two cameras of mine are set to continuous record to sd card, few main ones have camplus.

If you have camplus which I understand you may have, there is no cool down between event clips.

Yes. From a live view, tap “more” and disable “motion tracking”. I have my pan cams just staring at one direction, effectively making them a tall v2.

To help with this, if you don’t want the tracking like above, I’d go into settings for the camera, then advanced settings, then motor controls, then pan scan settings, and make only one waypoint. Have this be your “home view”. Now go into your detection settings and use the zone to block around what you want to have motion detected. These steps will keep your pancam pointed in one direction, and narrow down your focus for motion detection to hopefully get the gardner, and not the swaying branches.

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Thank you for the fast reply and the detailed suggestions! I will try them out.

I am currently on the CamPlus free trial so I have a few more days to decide whether to subscribe or not.

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Follow up: Your suggestions have been very helpful. I now have the camera staring at a fixed location and have disabled the motion tracking and the non-AI alerts. I’ve let CamPlus lapse so the AI alerts now come only every five minutes(*). We’ve got high winds where I am and it is good to not have the phone going berserk with alerts every time the shadow of a palm frond moves by a couple of pixels.

Marking as Solved.

(*) I just realized that I may not have AI alerts anymore. What I do have is Notifications enabled but Motion Events disabled. I am not sure what system is triggering the items I see in the Recent Events log. Not all that important but updating for clarity.

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