Hey all. I have a new Pan up and running. Love it. I placed in a area that watches my door and driveway. I have a lot of trees outside. I lower the sensitivity to 1 but every time the wind blows it goes nuts. Even turns to things that are not moving, like the door. Any way to lower it even more?
I would use a Wyze motion sensor. I have them linked to a few of my cameras and because it detects motion through heat, it is far more accurate.
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If you have had a Wyze Cam for a while, you may have received at least one notification that you consider to be a “false alert.” This could involve a bug, a cloud, trees waving in the breeze, or even just a lighting change. You may have even received an event video for something happening off in the distance to the point of you being surprised that your Wyze Cam picked it up at all! The reason for this is found in the motion detection method that Wyze products use.
Wyze Cams don’t have motion sensors like other cameras (such as iSmartAlarm’s Spot) do. Instead, they use what is known as a pixel comparison algorithm. This programming is included in your Wyze Cam’s firmware and we have made a couple of adjustments to it over time to improve its functionality. The algorithm compares frames from the video footage and checks if the pixels have changed between the two frames. Movement is defined by large clusters of pixels changing in this time. That’s why light becoming bright or dim in a room can set off an event recording even if nothing within the room is actually moving. Smaller objects moving close to the camera are more likely to change enough pixels to generate an event video than if they were far away and a strong wind can move your foliage enough to change the necessary percentage of pixels.
There are ways to adjust how likely you are to receive a false alert like this. The first is the motion detection sensitivity slider in your Wyze Cam’s Alert Settings. The slider has a range of 1-100 and will adjust the percentage of changed pixels that are necessary to generate an event video. At the lower sensitivity levels (going toward 1), more pixels will be needed to trigger recording an event video. At higher sensitivity levels (moving toward 100), fewer pixels have to be changed before an event video is generated. Please note that this does not mean 1% of the pixels to 100% of the pixels in the image. You can still receive an event video even if you have the sensitivity set to 1 and not all of the pixels have changed. If you have been receiving too many false alerts, turning down the sensitivity should help.
Another method for reducing the number of false alerts or alerts from areas that you care less about is to use the motion detection zone. This setting is found underneath the sensitivity slider and you will need to turn off the full screen setting to access the controls for it. When you enter the area for setting the detection zone, you can drag the corners of a box so that only the portion of the image that you want motion to be detected in is within the zone and your Wyze Cam will ignore everything else. This is a great way to make sure that you receive event recordings from people standing on your porch but not from your beautiful shrub in the yard. If you set one of these zones, you may find the need to turn down the sensitivity further to account for fewer pixels available in the change ratio.
The right settings for you will be different than the right settings for someone else. They will even be different depending on what angle your Wyze Cam is viewing. Finding the correct levels for you may take some trial and error but is a great way to improve your Wyze experience.
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