Recording starts on movement that should be blocked by Detection Zone

The files I uploaded shows I use Detection Zone to block a “whirling dervish” that spins when the wind blows, Because it swings as well, I’ve blocked out the area that encompasses it’s entire movement. I uploaded 3 videos that were recorded due to movement within the blocked area which should have been ignored.
I have examples from both V2 and V3 Cameras, but these probably show the situation best because it is in a very confined space.
Let me know if there is anything else you’d like to see or know about or any experiments you’d like me to perform.
Thanks,
DaBassMann@gmail.com
(Rick)





If the green box wasn’t square on the spinner, I would have said it was the shadow of the spinner in the yard. Maybe there was a glitch and the system thinks you do not have a detection zone setup. My only suggestion is to clear the detection zone, back out of the page, and then go back in and set it up again. Interesting problem.

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I believe the event is being triggered by the Shadow in the yard as indicated by @PCHearn .

Since you are using AI for your detection / Notification, the stream is then sent to the AI servers for processing. Once this happens, the entire stream / Frames are interrogated for AI detection and not your Detection Zone. The Detection Zone is used to minimize what triggers the event firing.

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Thanks for the suggestion PCHearn, however, I’ve done that multiple times, removed the power so it would reboot multiple times. and like I mentioned I have other examples where I had a flag that was blowing in the wind, blocked, and it still triggered recordings.

Spamoni4, I would almost agree with you, however, the green box is showing what triggers the recording in two of the 3 vids… and they aren’t anywhere close to the actual movement.

Just curious. Who puts the green box on the video? The camera or the server? Does the green box show the movement or does it show the AI event (if any)? I’m still learning…

Good question, I’m not sure… we’ll need one of the Wyze Experts to answer that question.

That is a great Question. I always believed that the green box shows the movements and the Camera is what shows the green box. If you don’t have AI turned on or Cam Plus, you will still get the Green Box if you have it selected, so it is part of the camera.

But realize, even thought you have a detection zone set, if something moves there it may still put a green box around it, but not trigger the detection or notification. I am tagging others which may have an answer on this:

@carverofchoice @R.Good

What do you all think?

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I figure this will be asked, so the V3 camera does have Cam Plus on it and is running version 4.9.8.860, and the Android phone I’m using is running version v2.28.2(111).

While I am not 100% sure… I would deduce that the Motion Tagging box is identified at the Camera level as you have stated.

Reasoning: If motion tagging is on you can see it during live video and not just on recorded events and playback.

It’s the live events that lead me to believe it is at the camera level and not the server/AI level.

Also the green box identifies the largest moving object if 2 objects are in motion
Knowledge Article
https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029809312-Motion-Tagging

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So then R.Good, where does the detection zone blocking come into play? Does the camera start the recording but then the server issues a kill command? Or is the blocking done by the camera itself? As you can see by my settings and recordings that something isn’t following the rules.

Yes, the motion tagging green highlight is absolutely done locally. If not, it wouldn’t also show up on the SD card playback, and it does.

Considerations/hypotheses:

  1. The detection zone isn’t always showing the accurate detection zone as you should know well, @R.Good & @spamoni as you guys made great comparisons showing how it differed in some instances between iOS/Android and portrait/landscape (different pixels covered by the detection zone), therefore we could be thinking the detection zone is blocking it out when it isn’t actually doing so.
    • I am leaning away from this explanation since @DaBassMann Took this into account and blocked out surrounding squares too. So this makes it less likely to be the case. Still, one could TRY blocking out a slightly larger area around it just as a test to see if it makes a difference. If it does, then slowly remove one more square at a time until you find what actually makes a difference to have a smaller blacked out zone.
  2. The shadow could be enough to TRIGGER the initial camera motion sensitivity and then the entire video is analyzed, and then the green detection square is only covering the actual spinner because it’s more dramatic. so the shadow initiates an event, then the spinner gets the green box because it is so much more dramatic
    • I have doubts of this because I think it would just expand the green box to cover both. But I can’t be absolutely sure if the threshold for the green square matches the threshold for the detection sensitivity…
    • Still, you could TEST this hypothesis by blocking out the shadow temporarily just to test and see if any events still trigger (I assume they will)
  3. There is a bug that should be reported, probably in Fix-It Friday.
    • I am leaning toward this.

I’m sure there are other explanations, but those come to mind off the top of my head.

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Thank you Carverofchoice. I’ll be happy to run experiments on both of those scenarios and if success then I’ll reduce the blocks until the culprit is determined. Thank you for the in depth explanation along with your thoughts. I’ll run those experiments over the weekend, I obviously need it to be windy for things to get triggered.

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Blow on it real hard or use a fan :grin:

I could still see the shadow being the culprit in this case.
Motion tagging is still picking up the motion of the whirling dervish (as seen by the green box in your examples) while that area of the dervish is ignored the shadow and pixel changes could be triggering the event notification as “motion detected”.

All your examples are at night where your (I believe) porch light is casting the shadow. Do you get the same notifications in the daylight?

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This is a fairly new location for this camera, so I don’t have much history on it. Today is very light wind, but tonight and tomorrow it’s supposed to increase. I hope to be able to do ALL of the testing over the next 36 hours, both daytime and night.

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Hi All, 1st Experiment… I increased the Det Zone on all sides and these were taken this morning during daytime hours. It still triggers and still puts the green motion box around the dervish. I looked very hard and couldn’t see anything else that would trigger movement.



  • The whole landscape seems to completely stutter. In both videos I counted 5 times that there was a sudden jolt that changed the entire video. I recall seeing that in other videos and I don’t think that’s the issue, but it could be. Maybe for some reason it is causing a MASSIVE pixel difference to occur constantly between 1 frame and next every 2 seconds or so. Watch the grass on the left middle. After that you can tell in other places like the deck lighting differences too.
  • Another thing I noticed is that there is another thing on the far right side that is swaying in the wind, I think it is a wind chime. It is less dramatic, but it is visible.
  • There is a hook on the right side swaying in the wind
  • There is something hanging from the rain gutter that I can see moving, like a string or something?
  • There is something between the hook on the right and the rain gutter that I saw moving.
  • Trees are definitely moving fairly strongly, the one on the upper left and the one on the upper-middle are moving.

All together, some of these things could be affecting the detection trigger. You can try blocking out some of the bigger things or turning down your motion sensitivity setting little by little and see if that helps.

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Hi Carver, I agree with everything you noted. Let me address each one.
#1)
All of my cameras do that stutter, even when it’s not recording and you’re just viewing a LIVE picture. The stutter becomes more pronounced when you’re viewing LIVE and you zoom in. With that said, the wind just picked up around noon today and started triggering more recordings. However, the stuttering has been going on all morning (on all cameras) and none of those are being triggered to start recordings. The stuttering is also much easier to see when the landscape is speckled like my lawn (rather than one color like concrete on a driveway.
#2) Although the wind chimes was already blocked out before, I added additional blocks around it.
#3-#6) I blocked out the entire top portion 2 blocks deep that should ignore the hooks, chains and trees.

So look at the last screenshot I attached. I blocked out the entire field of view, and you guessed it… I’m still getting recordings.

So I dropped the Sensitivity from 76 down to 51 and it would still record ME as I walked into frame, but the dervish no longer set it off. I moved it back to 76 and the dervish triggered a recording. I moved it down to 75 (just 1 less) and the dervish has NOT set it off, yet. I’m going to the grocery store and will leave it completely blocked with sensitivity set to 75 and see if the dervish triggers a recording.




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Weird, it dropped my first screenshot, so I’m adding it back here.

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Well, it finally triggered off of the dervish, but look how violently the dervish had to move in order to trigger it.
Sensitivity = 75
Det Zone = Completely blocked out

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You’ve done some really great testing with all this! I don’t have much to add or suggest from here other than continue tweaking like you have been. That’s what I had to do on several of my cams until I found the right settings for their particular situation.

I eventually got some cam plus licenses for my outdoor cams so that the AI would just tell me when there was something I’d actually care to know about (animals, people, etc) and then I didn’t have to worry so much about all the other motion issues outside, but before I used cam plus I went through this same process of tweaking things, so I think you’re doing really well at figuring things out.

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