Just got the new V4 camera (my first WYZE). I’m trying to set the detection zone to stop a flag on the porch from triggering alerts but it doesn’t seem to work. However I noticed now that I purchased the monthly AI service which allows notifications for different “events” rather than all of them the detection zone seems to work. The flag no longer triggers events. So it would seem the Detection Zone feature only works if you purchase the monthly AI service. Is that correct?
Welcome to the Forum, @tomkrameryin! 
That hasn’t been my experience as a non-subscriber. My guess is that your Detection Zone may not have been set (and still may not be set) in a way that completely blocks out the flag. I suspect that subscribing to Cam Plus (or whichever subscription you chose) and selecting notifications for Smart Detections is essentially acting as a filter so that now you’re no longer being alerted by flag movement.
I use a Detection Zone on a non-subscribed Video Doorbell v2 to mask a waving flag, and it works pretty well, though it took some tweaking to get right.
If you want some feedback on your Detection Zone settings, then feel free to share some screenshots (your Detection Settings screen, Detection Zone screen, video or screenshot of an event that triggered a notification when you weren’t expecting one, etc.). Even if you don’t use the feature routinely, it’s helpful if you can at least temporarily enable Motion Tagging (so that the green boxes show up to highlight detected motion in a given frame) as part of the Detection Zone troubleshooting.
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One possible trigger source is the flag’s shadow. It’s in the detection zone.
Crease is right, the subscription’s filter is working for you, not the subscription/detection zone combo.
I didn’t see the Detection Settings screen to show where you set Motion Detection Sensitivity, but that may not really matter at this point, and I think the other visuals are helpful! 
With the flag right in the middle of the camera’s view and the Detection Zone taking up the center of your image, I still think the flag-triggered notifications disappeared because you’re now using Smart Detection Events with a subscription, so if I were you I’d probably just turn the Detection Zone completely off to avoid excluding that part of your picture from detection.
If you wanted to screen the flag blowing activity out by using a Detection Zone without a subscription (like, if you’re trying Cam Plus for a month or whatever and decide not to continue it later), then I’d expand that exclusion zone in the middle. What I see when I look at the first two images is that the green Motion Tagging box is extending outside your exclusion area. When I overlay the two images, it’s pretty clear when you look at the box’s upper-left corner:
A general rule of thumb that I’ve seen in the Forum is to give whatever area you’re trying to mask out (i.e., the exclusion zone) a buffer of at least 1 additional box, so you’d want to navigate to your Detection Zone screen and make another 1-box grey border most of the way around the greyed area that you’ve already excluded. Basically, you want to go beyond where a blowing flag is likely to cause a generic motion-triggered event.
In your case, though, sticking with a subscription might be the better choice. That’s the easy way to exclude the flag as a trigger, and you get other potential benefits. If you want to do this without a subscription, then it’s probably going to involve a lot of trial-and-error tweaking to your Detection Zone and potentially moving your camera to get a different vantage point (because you’re going to end up blocking out a big area in the center of the view that you might not really want to exclude).
Thanks for the tips! I’ll give them a shot. I do like the camera and it seems an excellent value. Not too crazy about having to have the subscription so I might just move the flag. It seems to always tag it as a vehicle or a person anyway.
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This happens to several of my v4 and v3 cameras too.
We get wildlife that my wife likes to feed. She put carrots and apples on a lid for our wastewater treatment system, and i created the detection zone to only look at the lid.
This is a v3
I get detection events quite often from traffic in the road which is well away from the detection zone.
It is cloudy so there are no shadows.
I did get a special firmware for one of my v4s that corrected this issue for that camera. Rather than pester for firmware updates for the other cameras, I plan to wait for an official firmware release that hopefully incorporates this fix.
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How did you menage that?
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Doesn’t your detection zone look at everything except the lid? I thought the dark area is excluded and the light area is included. Maybe I have mine setup backwards.
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I think the inverse. Maybe blacken the entire screen and then lighten the lid area.
The car is in your detection zone. The only thing excluded is the lid. Your DZ is working correctly. If you only want to look at the lid, you have it backwards.
DZ on my v4 is working fine. It is more sensitive to headlights washing the area than the OG in the same spot was, but I recall a firmware release on the OG that specifically said reducing sensitivity to lighting changes. Maybe the v4 will get something similar but it hasn’t been too big of an issue.
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As I understand it, at least one of two things are happening:
- The AI isn’t completely accurate about what it detects, which is why Wyze prompts you to share videos to help improve their AI.
- When an event is triggered, the AI analyzes everything in the image. Even if the inciting motion wasn’t caused by a vehicle (for instance), if the AI detects a vehicle in the whole image (irrespective of the Detection Zone), then the event will get that tag.
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AI needs work. Hopefully we will see improvements.
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You can exclude everywhere the flag is able to go, it should still leave enough to catch someone’s legs as they walk up your steps etc. Might take a bit of trial and error.
Keep in mind with DZ you don’t need to show the entire person/object, just need some sort of motion in the zone to trigger it, so you can actually make zones quite small and still capture what you want.
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Thanks for that info. So if the AI detects any movement and doesn’t know how to tag it, it will be tagged as a vehicle if there’s one in the image but it’s not moving.
A few times the AI has gotten it correct with a pet and a person and generally vehicles moving are tagged correctly. It has yet to identify a package. It frequently identifies a cat as a cat AND a vehicle even though there are no vehicles moving on the street. So it seems like any event gets an additional tag of vehicle since there are almost always parked vehicles.
I have been submitting the videos for feedback to hopefully improve the AI.
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Thank you Dave. Still futzing with it. It’s getting better.
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Minor correction: any movement within the detection zone