Person detection for triggering lights

I set up several rules to trigger my lights indoor and outdoor when my cam v3s detect a person during specific times of the day. I chose to use person detection rather than motion detection because I was running into an issue with motion detection triggering false detection due to lighting changes (especially when my lights would trigger off). Every time my lights would automatically turn off after X minutes, they would immediately, automatically trigger back on because the motion detection would pick up on the lighting change and therefore trigger the rule to turn the light back on.

The person detection has been perfectly reliable. However, the problem I am running into now is that the rule takes about 15+ seconds to trigger as it requires (I believe) the event to be sent, processed and returned from the servers. This is far too long to be useful for triggering lights as you walk around the house.

Is anyone else having issues with the motion detection? Is there another solution or work around? Is there any plan to make a wyze product to perform local AI computation to speed up the response time?

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The AI processing is on the servers which is what causes the delay. Your best bet is to use motion sensors rather than the cameras. They use passive infrared to detect motion. The cameras use pixel changes in the image which results in motion detection for shadows, blowing leaves, etc. But the motion sensors also rely on the servers to trigger events so you may still have delays.

I’m trying to avoid motion sensors to reduce redundancy and overall cost. It is probably the best solution at this point but I think it would be a shame not to use what I already have as it should be able to complete the routines I created.

Is anyone else having the same issue when your lights trigger off and then back on by the camera motion sensor? Could this be solved by wyze using some kind of delay function?

I tried this way back using IFTTT. It was less than perfect and I gave up. I was thinking of revisiting it, but I’m more likely to use Ring as I prefer their outdoor camera options and I use them for Key Amazon deliveries.

No matter what system you use there will probably be delays if the internet and cloud servers are involved. More so if the servers need to process everything. So with Person detection it works like this:

Camera detects motion and starts recording to the cloud.
Servers detect person and flags the image.
Server detects a rule that is triggered by the person detection and evaluates action
Server sends command to the bulb/switch/light to turn on.

All of this takes time and any slowness on your connection or the busyness of the servers can slow it all down. If you want/need immediate action, use a different product that has all functions local to the physical site.

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I understand how it works and I agree with what you are saying. However, I should be able to alternatively use the camera motion sense as I indicated earlier. It has a quick response time which is what I am looking for. But, the problem still remains that the light will trigger off and then immediately back on which currently makes it not useful. I would think that the software could be built to filter this out as it knows the lighting is being changed by another wyze device (wyze plug, bulb, or switch).

That’s the issue with using the camera. Lighting changes are detected as motion. Wyze doesn’t have any filter mechanism to ignore the light changes so you get the on/off/on problem. Not sure if they found some way around it for the flood light, but I think it uses PIR sensors, not the camera.

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If you use Person Detection to get around random pixel triggers, then you will experience a delay while the cloud AI decides whether a person is in the clip that was sent to it.

Personally, I have gotten around that by using Motion sensors. In my case I simply have an old V1 motion sensor over the front door that detects if someone is approaching, and triggers my alert light bulb. It is so fast it triggers almost as quick as they enter the frame, and several seconds before they get to the doorbell. :slight_smile:

With motion sensors you need to make sure they don’t false trigger, tho. So I turn my sensor away from the neighbor’s pets, kids, and lawn mower, and I have an overhang that blinds it to anything beyond midway on my driveway. :slight_smile:

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I mentioned the idea of motion sensors earlier but:

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Filtering would be a nice mechanism and it would solve the problem.