I would like to see a feature to suppress sprites, short lived small but intense events which trigger detection. Examples are raindrops or blowing snow, particularly when illuminated by IR night view. These have characteristics of unusually intense brightness, very short lived (small fractions of a second) and typically follow some linear trajectory (as in blowing snow or falling rain).
During rain or snow, my cameras are triggering almost constantly. I have set sensitivity so low that it often doesn’t detect real events, and set person, vehicle, pet detection but motion is often still detected.
I think this would have to be built into the firmware since up front processing would be needed to avoid triggering a detection.
Possible other solutions which may have more general appeal would be suppressing uploads for detections lasting a short time, 1/2 second or less say (but adjustable would be nice). The upload image should include this qualification time should it exceed the threshold so nothing important is missed.
If you have CamPlus, you can set it up for person / pet / vehicle etc so you are not notified, but the motion events are still uploaded (else no AI processing can occur).
I did not want to expand on what I thought was an obvious problem with simple solutions. I am sure I am not the only user who has noticed that during rain or snow you get almost constant detections. Blowing leaves, birds or bugs flying by, shadows of trees moving in the wind, etc. also cause such annoyance triggers.
This happens if AI detection for pet, person, etc. is enabled or not. I just tried those to try to stop all of these false notifications and resulting uploads and SD card recordings. As I said, that doesn’t stop the problem either.
The characteristics of the “sprites” as I call them are easy to detect and therefore filter out compared to actual events of interest, and there are many solutions, but these need to be done up front to stop the unnecessary uploads and SD writes.
There is a subforum for feature requests, you first search to see if it has been requested (and add your vote if so) and if not, create the request, wait for it to be approved, then go cast the first vote.
There is already a feature request to add a rule or setting to have the IR LEDs only turn on if motion is detected (which would prevent a lot of the bug and reflection detections). But new features are typically slow to be added.
Right now your only options are to utilize detection zone and sensitivity settings to try and reduce them. You can also use an external IR light placed away from the camera and disable the camera ones. Mounting the camera away from regular lights can help reduce bugs and reflection type detections as well.
In reality if you have a good SD card and aren’t on a metered internet connection, the extra recordings and uploads aren’t a big deal and having the “AI” suppress the false events helps a lot.
Turning off the IR leds isn’t a solution for me because at night I would never detect anything since there is no light for the camera to use to detect motion. A separate light defeats the purpose of these cameras - I might as well buy some other manufacturers camera.
The issue also isn’t a good SD card or unlimited internet service, it’s the hundreds of false detections which may hide a significant event.
I like Joeman’s suggestion of a detection time setting since it is probably the simplest to implement in firmware. I would like to see such a time setting to be adjustable, which would not be more difficult in firmware.
A more powerful but more complicated solution would be a power function, time and number of pixels detected, which would useful to detect a larger animal or human running past the camera. I’m not sure the cameras have enough processing power or memory to implement a power feature.
Just know that even other manufactures cameras with onboard IR or visible light spotlights will see the snow and bugs and rain and particulates as well due to the illuminations location right next to the camera lens. Its not something that effects one brand of camera.
Make sure to vote on that wishlist topic to help support, as well as comment with your use case to help it along!
In my case there is enough ambient light to detect motion without the IR LEDs, just need the IR to switch on to get more detail. You might be surprised how much the cam can pick up when it seems like there is no light.
I agree the separate IR illuminator is not a great solution, I haven’t done it because it hasn’t been a big enough deal for me, I record 24x7 to microSD so if there is something I really need to find, it just takes me a bit longer to do it since most of the “events” at night are just bugs, rain, dust, etc. But many have gone with the external IR LED solution and like it, so just mentioning it as an option.
They’ll have the same issue (unless they include AI detection and it works well, technically it still has the issue it just uses software to filter it for you). It is one of the drawbacks to IR night vision, along with reflecting off glass and usually having some visible indication that it is there (in case you want to be stealth). Some of the external ones out there can do it without any red color to the LED at all so that’s another benefit of those if you’re trying to keep it unobvious.
This feature already exists (AI detections), but you need a Cam Plus subscription for it. The camera doesn’t need any processing power as all clips get uploaded to wyze and analyzed by their servers to determine if an event should be logged or not.