Floodlight and Camera Constantly Re-Triggering When Using SMART Detection

Cameras
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I recently upgraded from the original floodlight cam V3 to the new Floodlight Pro. Unfortunately, it has been a bear to get it working properly, and it appears to be an issue with the onboard AI. I have the camera mounted above a garage facing the street and am using Smart Detection with ‘vehicle’ and ‘person’ selected to trigger both the floodlight and camera recording. My hope was that I could have the floodlight trigger whenever a car drives by, like the old school PIR security lights, but with using the onboard AI as a trigger.

However, with the default detection sensitivity at ~70 the floodlight and camera continuously re-trigger after a Smart Detection event when there is ANY motion and a PARKED vehicle in the frame. This is when using Smart Detection, not ‘All Motion’. The promo material and product description (as well as the way the older V3 floodlight cam worked) led me to believe that it would only trigger when a MOVING vehicle was detected. It does trigger when a car drives by but then re-triggers over and over again if there is a PARKED car in the field of view and a tree is moving in the wind, some bugs become interested in the light and fly around in front of the camera, even the light itself turning off seems to be enough ‘motion’ in the presence of a parked car to re-trigger it.

The only solution Ive found is to turn down the motion detection setting to between 30-40, but in that range it starts missing several of the cars that drive by and so doesn’t trigger the floodlight- which completely defeats the purposeof using the floodlight as a deterrent. It can’t act as a security light (or security camera for that matter) if it doesnt trigger during a legitimate detection event. But if I set the sensitivity much higher it just turns on and off all night.

It seems that the onboard AI is having a hard time discerning between a moving vehicle and just general movement that occurs when a stationary vehicle is also in the field of view. That is definitely not the way the new AI features were advertised to work. Again, this only happens after a car drives by, so the initial trigger works fine, but then it wont stop re-triggering until I either manually turn off the floodlight and/or camera in the app or the totally unrelated things that should not be picked up by the AI (bugs, tress, etc) stop moving.

I understand this product is very new and might need some tweaks to its firmware over time to get everything dialed in but this seems to be a fairly major issue to me, and one that needs to be addressed pretty quickly. People are going to park cars in their driveways. They’re going to have neighbors who park cars in the street. That should not mean the floodlight and camera should re-trigger every 30 seconds if there are trees moving in the wind or a bug decides to check out the lights after a legitimate Smart detection event.

Yes, I have the newest firmware. Yes, my app is up to date. Yes, Ive power cycled the camera and have done every other troubleshooting tip I could find. Ive spent more than a few hours over the last several days trying to make the new floodlight work as advertised. This very much seems like a software/AI issue that I hope the team at WYZE can fix in a future firmware update. It has the potential to be an amazing product, and I sincerely hope this issue gets resolved.

Side Note: the Floodlight Pro doesn’t have Smart Detection options for ‘pet’ ‘package’ or ‘friendly faces’ and also completely lacks any way to trigger recording based on sound detection. The V3 Floodlight cam I replaced with the Pro version had all of these options. Is there a plan to add these back in with future firmware updates?

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Welcome to the Wyze User Community Forum @ddd1249! :raising_hand_man:

Your sensitivity is too high. And you are correct, lowering the sensitivity reduces its effectiveness.

I had the same experience but I was only activating the lights on Person Detection. The floodlights were constantly activating with no person in the FOV but was only uploading a motion video. The Server AI was not tagging it Person because it saw no person in the uploaded video.

I contacted Customer Support and they recommended starting with a sensitivity of 40 and making very slight adjustments, one point at a time, until the sweet spot was reached. I am now at 42.

This issue has been reported to the Wyze Team for improvement in the future. IMO, if the floodlight is activated for an onboard AI Person Event, there better be a Person tagged Event Upload so that I am able to submit it to Wyze for onboard AI retraining updates. There is no reason that the sensitivity should be below half it’s capability for the AI to work marginally.

I am going to continue to track progress in future WFLP updates with the hopes that the balance between effectiveness and sensitivity improves.

The Wyze Project Manager for the WFLP did indicate during an AMA event that the WFLP has enhanced onboard AI that should only trigger on moving AI objects, not stationary ones:

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Thanks for sharing your insight, it adds a lot more context to the issue. Its interesting that the onboard AI is triggering with a person detection while the server AI clearly omits the tag since there is no one present in the frame. It sounds like there is at least some difference in the detection criteria between the two. Im glad to hear they’re aware of the issue so they can work on a fix, and also glad to see via the AMA that the goal is to only trigger on moving AI detections- thanks for posting that.

An update on my end- I began to wonder if the sharp (but necessary) change in the contrast ratio of the camera feed while the light was on versus when it turned off and recalibrated might be causing a flase trigger. With the light on the cars in the street are in the background and so they become darkened so the lit areas arent oversaturated. As soon as the light turns off the contrast ratio changes and they become brighter, so perhaps that change was enough for the onboard AI to detect a vehicle that hadnt ‘been’ there a moment before, causing it to interpret it as a vehicle in ‘motion’. I tried testing the idea by turning down the brightness of the floodlight to 60% so the change in contrast wouldnt be as significant while also turning up the detection setting to 45 and its seemed to work well so far. However, that would not explain why yours was falsely detecting a person with no one in the frame, so perhaps there’s more than one thing causing the false re-triggering.

I also may have not turned up the detection enough to make much of a difference, Ill try turning up the detection to 55 tonight to see if it still has the re-trigger issue with a lower floodlight brightness. I still hope that ultimately we’re just able to use a reasonably higher detection threshold with a sufficiently bright floodlight setting.

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I don’t have any bright lights passing in my FOV, so I’m not getting any changes in the contrast that may be confusing the AI. And, since the floodlight is set to only activate on onboard AI Person Detection, the detection has already happened before the floodlight comes on. So there is definitely something in my FOV that the onboard AI is confusing for a person. But, since I have no way of submitting a “Tagged” video, there is no way to push the error up to the devs to look at the onboard AI mistake. I’m not really sure how they plan on updating the onboard AI if they have no feedback mechanism for users to show how it is making mistakes.

I do have a significant amount of vegetation movement when it is breezy, so the onboard AI is obviously mistaking trees waving for people moving.

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I recently bought 4 of the camera floodlight pro and they all have an issue with smart detect working properly. I constantly get false people detect for recording events and for triggering the flood light. The false trigger happens a lot especially when there is snow or rain. Looks like the trained model needs to be retrained with snow and rain conditions and for when the ambient light is on or off or for the condition when flood light is on at higher intensity than the ambient lighting. I’m also getting false trigger for my stationery auto parked in my driveway.