FYI, the green motion tag is often completely independent of of the detection zone on most of the cams (I say often because there are a few cases on one or 2 camera models I’ve seen where the motion tag will never highlight anything in the non-detection areas, but most of the camera models do). Seeing the green motion tag on something outside the detection zone does not necessarily mean that motion is being considered for an event trigger or AI object detection recognition.
I can explain a little how the detection zone generally works a little differently from how many people assume it works. Let’s say that someone has a detection zone set up based on this random view that I pulled off the Wyze website (from a review):
- The green zone is the detection zone.
- Yellow is a person who is 30-50% in the zone and half or more outside the zone.
- Blue is a car driving by, completely outside the detection zone,
- Red is the camera’s estimate of the motion tag or parts that could possibly be related to the motion object (called the object “bounding box” outline…to get an idea of what I mean, it’s similar to what you see when you turn on the Green motion tag for the cameras to have it highlight an object in a green box…it’s not an exact fit/outline on the object, but a box shape that goes out a little farther).
The detection zone will trigger for the yellow guy and detect it as a person even though half the person is not in the detection zone, because the AI will consider a full object even if part of it is outside the detection zone, as long as some part of the object’s bounding box is within the detection zone.
Similarly, even though the blue highlight car is 100% outside of the detection zone area, the camera may consider the whole red highlighted area as part of the car and consider that within the detection zone area and the AI would also detect that car because part of the estimated bounding box was within the detection zone even though 100% of the car never was. So in this case, it can detect something fully outside of the detection zone in certain cases. To compensate for this, it is often suggested to give an extra buffer and shrink the detection area down an extra layer or 2 to help ensure undesired bounding box overlap into the detection zone is less likely.
In some cases, it is possible that the main motion is outside the detection zone, maybe even across the street, but then wind blows some foliage around and while it may not be as dramatic as the motion across the street (so the green motion tag stays mostly on the more dramatic motion elsewhere), it might be enough to trigger an invisible bounding box to overlap into the detection zone.
It is hard to say exactly what is happening in your situation or to give recommendations to compensate for it without seeing some examples. If you are willing to upload a sample event along with a screenshot of your current detection zone, I’d certainly look it over, and some other users might have some further suggestions based on our experience working out similar issues.
Same with the spotlight issue, it would be helpful to see an example.