WyzeCam 4 motion detection sensitivity issues

[SHaase]

I have 12 WyzeCams (mix of v2/v3/v4) most of which are used for casual monitoring of driveways, etc. Earlier this year I put in a koi pond and within a few months some heron started coming to my pond to eat my koi. I installed several new (v4) cams to monitor the pond with the expectation that I would get notified when they detected motion so I could scare the heron away.

So far this has been a complete failure as none of my cameras have ever managed to detect even one of the dozens of instances that a heron came to the pond. As a result, I’ve had to resort to a combination of manually monitoring my cameras throughout the day (which is both exhausting and error prone as I can’t watch it every second) + manually setting up and reviewing time lapse footage every day to catch cases where I missed something during my on-going manual monitoring. Side note - PLEASE add a feature to automatically create timelapses so I don’t have to do this every day…

I have tried many different settings, but no settings have ever managed to detect a heron. I currently have the sensitivity set to 100 and have tried both with and without detection zones on. The camera detects other things (like people, or moving trees when it’s windy) just fine so I expect the issue is with the algorithm but if anyone has other ideas I can try, please let me know. If this is simply an algorithm issue, is there some way to provide feedback for missed events? The app provides a mechanism to give feedback on events, but I can’t find any way to send feedback when it failed to detect an event.

As an amusing side note, it seems herons aren’t the only thing it has trouble detecting. This footage did not result in a single event being fired. One of my other cameras did fire off a notification, though it was auto-tagged with “Vehicle” and “Pet” which, I suppose kind of makes sense in this case
https://1drv.ms/v/s!Am5Ay3OlpMyWsJ8kRRyM-8sIKYQ9Ew?e=DNZXB0

[dave27]

Are you using Cam Plus with “AI” detections? If not, there is no algorithm involved.

Make sure you have “other motion” checked off (which if you don’t have cam plus, I’m assuming you already do). I’ve found my cams to be extremely sensitive so perhaps a factory reset of the cam is in order, maybe something got corrupted or a setting messed up.

Keep in mind without cam plus, you can receive a maximum 1 notification every 5 minutes (well 2 if you enable sound detections but those are annoying). Maybe you’re getting a lot of other detections and that is causing you to miss events you want to see since they happen within 5 minutes?

Do you have “motion tagging” (the green box) on? If so, when reviewing the SD card, are the herons surrounded by a green box? That would mean the detection is working but something else is preventing you from getting notified.

[Antonius]

Do Bears need a fishing license?

[SHaase]

I was using Cam Plus with Smart Detection Events enabled, and every “Smart Motion” type (Person, Pet, Vehicle, Package) was enabled for both Record and Notify. I don’t see a “other motion” option anywhere. I didn’t realize using Smart Detection Events would actually limit the events I got - particularly since I enabled every type of event. I had thought this was just used to classify the events as they came in.

After seeing your reply, I changed the Event Recording setting from Smart Detection Events => All Events and immediately started getting spammed by constant event notifications. I think there may just be a bug here in the app. When All Events is enabled and I look at the Customize Detections page, the list of Motion types is:

Person, Friendly Faces, Pet, Vehicle, Package, and Other Motion.

In contrast, when Smart Detection Events is selected and I look at the Customize Detection page, the list of Smart Motion types is:

Person, Friendly Faces, Pet, Vehicle, and Package.

There is no Other Motion option available. Since there is no Other Motion option, it seems like Smart Detections are limited to only triggering for the subset of things it knows how to identify (People, etc).

Assuming this is the case, the Smart Detections are useless for me in this scenario so I’ve switched to All Events and am trying to dial in the sensitivity and detection zone settings. This is unfortunate as all of my events are simply listed as “Motion detected”, regardless of their source - but that’s better than not getting any notifications. It would be great if they could add the “Other Motion” option to Smart Detections as a catch all so that I could get all events AND have some of them automatically classified.

BTW, for reference, with All Events enabled I’ve had to dial my detection sensitivity down from 100% to 30% to keep from being spammed with constant notifications, and I expect I’ll need to dial it back further. I also have excluded all of the pond water from the detection zone but for some reason it seems to still be firing events from that as evidenced by the green square in the event recording (which is 100% in the exclusion zone). Not sure what’s up with that, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to dial it in to keep errant notifications to a minimum.

[dave27]

It is just a confusing layout in the app. When you have smart events enabled, you have to go under notifications, and in there you’ll see the “other motion” and “other sound” options. In that screen you can change the event recording (tag) and the notifications (notify).

Since you were toying with 100% sensitivity, and turning on sound (I think you said that) you probably need to turn those back down, and set your detection zone again. Then the “other motion” should be usable.

[SHaase]

The “other motion” option is only available when All Events are selected. Here are some screen shots:

Settings => Event Recording (with All Events selected):

Settings => Event Recording => Customize Detections (with All Events selected). This is the same page you get taken to from Settings => Notifications => Events/Manage. Note - Other Motion is listed at the bottom

In comparison, here are the screen shots for Smart Detections:

Settings => Event Recording (with Smart Detection Events selected):

Settings => Event Recording => Customize Recordings (with Smart Detection Events selected). Note there is no Other Motion option listed.

[dave27]

The confusion comes from the fact that there are two different places.

If you turn your “smart events” back on, the detections screen will lose the “other motion”. However if you go into the notifications screen, it will be there, and will look just like the screen you saw in events when you had it set to “all”.

It doesn’t make much sense, but you can change both the event recording and notification settings from the notification screen, including the “other sounds” and “other motion” even when it doesn’t show in the events screen.

But in reality, it probably isn’t going to detect the Heron as a pet, so you may just want to leave that cam on “all events”, eliminating the AI, and just focus on setting your detection zone and sensitivity to cut down the false alerts.

[SHaase]

Dave, I thought I understood how it’s working, but your last reply is now making me think that I’m either still missing something or I’m not properly communicating what I’m seeing.

From my side, everything I’m describing is from the starting point of the Settings screen for a given camera. That Settings screen has links to both the Event Recording screen and the Notifications screen. The Notifications screen has a link to Manage events which will take you one of two different screens, depending on what your Event Recording setting is set to. Those two screens are labelled Customize Detections and Customize Recordings. Customize Detections includes “Other Motion” whereas Customize Recordings does not.

The Customize Detections and Customize Recordings screens are the exact same screens that you can also access from the Event Recording screen. In the Event Recording screen, that ‘Customize XYZ’ menu item gets changed to Customize Detection if you select All Events. If you change your selection to Smart Detection Events then the link changes to Customize Recording. You can see all of this in the screen shots from my previous post. The Manage link from the Notifications screen is just a redundant way of accessing the same page that’s available from the Event Recording screen. As such, the only way to access the “Other Motion” option is to enable All Events.

Hopefully that makes more sense. If so, and I’m still missing something, please let me know . In any case, I have switched to All Events for these cams and am actively tweaking the detection threshold (now down to 20%) and detection zone settings.

Thanks for the help!

[dave27]

I don’t have cam plus so I don’t see the screens you see, but someone else had posted them here a while back with similar questions. But it may differ from cam to cam too (as some things do). So when I go into settings on any of my cams,

Event Recording → Customize Detections
Notifications → Manage

Takes me to the exact same screen. But apparently when you have cam plus and enable smart detection, one of the two changes. I thought it was the event recording that changes and the notifications that doesn’t, but I may have that backwards. The confusing part is in the one that doesn’t change, those settings still take effect and somewhat override the settings on the other screen.

But with smart events enabled, you should be able to see the “other sounds” and “other motion” on one of those two screens. In reality having both smart detections and “other motion” enabled just buys you the label on the event sometimes saying “person” or “vehicle” or whatever, so not really a huge benefit. In this instance probably easiest to just forget about the “smart” on that camera and use the “all events” option.

[Crease]

@SHaase, that bear video is awesome. I didn’t intend to sit and watch the whole thing, but then the surprise arrival of the second bear really sucked me in. Looks like a candidate for The Wyzies if/when they do that again.

@SHaase

I thought I understood how it’s working

I think you do, and I think some of @dave27’s confusion arises from not being a Cam Plus subscriber, because we don’t see all those same settings screens (and can’t really select Smart Detection Events on the Event Recording screen without a prompt to subscribe).

@SHaase

making me think that…I’m not properly communicating what I’m seeing.

You are, and the visuals are helpful. What you’re describing has been discussed in more depth elsewhere on the Forum, including this topic:

Complete Motion Detected

I setup a v4 camera a few weeks ago and had alerts for vehicle motion disabled (notify unchecked), since we have a lot of traffic and I don’t want to exclude the road and our mailbox. I upgraded to Cam Plus the other day and had to go back in and reset up my alerts, including unchecking notify for vehicle motion alerts. However, now I’m getting these “Complete Motion Detected” every time a car drives down the road. I don’t see an “other” option under Smart Motion. How do I turn off this new …

@SHaase

I think there may just be a bug here in the app.

I don’t know if it qualifies as a bug, but it certainly seems like an odd choice to hide that Other Motion (and the corresponding Other Sounds) line unless All Events is selected, and that’s been reported to Wyze, but apparently they haven’t chosen to change it.

It’s a good quirk of the app to know about, though, because it’s possible for a Cam Plus subscriber to be unnecessarily spammed with “Complete Motion Detected” (or “Sound Detected”) notifications if the relevant settings line is checked for NOTIFY but the user isn’t even aware because it’s not a visible setting when Smart Detection Events is selected.

[carverofchoice]

I love that bear video so much! That whole scene is so beautiful!