Open question: What is your Camect detecting?

[AAron nAAs]

I'm curious about what others' Camects are detecting.

With Camect's long list, I expected to see more specific things recognized, but there isn't really anything fancy in my neighborhood.

Hah. Has anyone seen "fly", "mouse" or "skunk" recognized yet on their Camect?

My cameras are aiming down from second floor to driveway, patio, ... ie, around the house.

(So my angles aren't straight on or close, so I'm glad it recognizes people and cars so well.)

I frequently see:

• car
  
• person
• cat
  
• small animal (actually a cat at night)

Less frequently:

• "dog" being walked by a "person" on the sidewalk
• "truck" which was the cable company in my driveway (and sometimes my car as "truck")
• "bear" on my patio at night (mis-recognized as drive by car lights danced around. No bears here!)

Not yet recognized:

• "USPS person" (only "person"). Camect points out that they look for the logo, not reflector striped uniform.
• "Amazon person" (only "person"). I can see the swoop on the back of the uniform, but Camect doesn't.

Maybe your delivery people clearer than this?

[CamectChao]

On Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 8:15:57 PM UTC-8, AAron nAAs wrote:

I'm curious about what others' Camects are detecting.

With Camect's long list, I expected to see more specific things recognized, but there isn't really anything fancy in my neighborhood.

Hah. Has anyone seen "fly", "mouse" or "skunk" recognized yet on their Camect?

My cameras are aiming down from second floor to driveway, patio, ... ie, around the house.

(So my angles aren't straight on or close, so I'm glad it recognizes people and cars so well.)

I frequently see:

• car
  
• person
• cat
  
• small animal (actually a cat at night)

Less frequently:

• "dog" being walked by a "person" on the sidewalk
• "truck" which was the cable company in my driveway (and sometimes my car as "truck")
• "bear" on my patio at night (mis-recognized as drive by car lights danced around. No bears here!)

If you are still getting these, share one or two with us. Such false alerts usually will be gone after 1-2 cycles of AI training.

Not yet recognized:

• "USPS person" (only "person"). Camect points out that they look for the logo, not reflector striped uniform.
• "Amazon person" (only "person"). I can see the swoop on the back of the uniform, but Camect doesn't.

Share several of the Amazon person with us for training. We probably could recognize a logo of that size.

The USPS one is too small though..

[AAron nAAs]

I had a UPS guy come by! Though it says "person" of course...

If you're looking for UPS logo, you're definitely not going to like this one.

I'm also interested what others are seeing for "UPS/USPS/Amazon person"s... and how close the cameras need to be.

Ok, I'll be sure to submit clips of "Amazon person"s.

I'm surprised that you don't look for uniforms (reflector lines in particular). If you're worried about improper recognitions... anyone can have a logo on a shirt (intentionally or not).

Oh, Camect saw this too.

[Dolf Starreveld]

My USPS and Amazon persons are very recognizable to me because of their consistent uniforms (including colors), but the logos on their uniforms are quite small and, combined with camera angle, may not be usable for detection purposes. Camect identifies all of them as "person" (i.e. unspecific). I would imagine that the color scheme and other attributes should be able to be used for recognition purposes.

[Jason Sharpee]

We get bird, raccoon, mouse quite frequently (we have all of these). It will misidentify Chipmunks as mice though.

We have fox, opossum, otters, muskrat, deer as well that show up as unknown.

We get the "bear" false alerts quite often with shadows. Honestly was surprised bear and skunk are categories and "deer" are missing.

[Dolf Starreveld]

We get dog (sometimes misidentified as cat), and rat (identified sometimes as cat, sometimes as mouse). Squirrels too (correctly identified).

[CamectChao]

We added bear because one of our very early testing users wanted this. 

We know it's not very good because we don't have much training data, as you can image. This is why we disable it by default.

We are working on adding deer. Please give us some time.

For those bear false alerts, can you share some of them to us so we can use them as training data? (I don't remember you shared any of such?)

On Friday, February 7, 2020 at 8:14:26 PM UTC-8, Jason Sharpee wrote:

[CamectChao]

On Friday, February 7, 2020 at 3:13:20 PM UTC-8, Dolf Starreveld wrote:

My USPS and Amazon persons are very recognizable to me because of their consistent uniforms (including colors), but the logos on their uniforms are quite small and, combined with camera angle, may not be usable for detection purposes. Camect identifies all of them as "person" (i.e. unspecific). I would imagine that the color scheme and other attributes should be able to be used for recognition purposes.

This is something we may try as a "research" effort, as we are not sure whether it'll give good results. I cannot give any promise about when we'll do it though.

We have some other requests lining up like license plate recognition. We'll have a feature voting system. It'll help us decide which one we should work on first.

[Dolf Starreveld]

I think voting is a good idea to gauge interest levels, but I would urge you to filter it through your own knowledge about difficulty of implementation, chances of success (for AI type stuff), and overall effort.

[CamectArup]

Definitely.  The votes will have to be weighed against the issues you mentioned or else the results would be a pretty bad prioritization for a small company. 

[Fredrik]

Nice post,

I would love to have "Deer" - since I have one/some passing the cams almost every night.

Also - becoming a hen house owner later this year - I would love to have something that would trigger "Fox" or "badger" (which are the first and foremost dangers) - any type (or the whole group) of mustelid would be awesome - but I can understand that it would be harder (maybe?).

Cheers!

[AAron nAAs]

That's quite the variety. Makes me consider using Camect at a zoo :-)

I know we have rabbits around, but will have to wait til summer to see if Camect recognizes them.

[JeremyM]

There's an interesting idea there, to have an alternate set to enable based on what the camera is for. In this case, I'm thinking small animal versus medium or large animal, or even not-chicken.

[Robert Spendlove]

I like the variety of alerts, even though there are a few false alarms. I have one cam that always seems to get the dogs from up high, and they are really small in the frame. They're West Highland White Terriers, so I can totally see why the AI would mistake them for a (polar) bear.

It even picks them out walking on the snow sometimes.

[EnhanceEnhanceEnhance]

I have a Hikvision LPR and would vote for license plate recognition. I’d be happy to share sample video, I think that would be an awesome addition.

[AAron nAAs]

I had my first "skunk" recognized !!?!?

It was a friendly backpacker coming to my door at night.

Shoes seem to have enough IR white to appear to be two skunks? Soon after, Camect realizes its a person person.

This is silly, but a real mis-recognition, so I'll submit the video.

[Jason Sharpee]

I seem to be getting more than usual "Person" detected false positives in the past few weeks. Some that are just flat out not even close to a person (compressor fan blade slowing down).   

Im not sure how the training data is supervised, but it would appear a human is classifying videos of people that involve objects that they are carrying / affecting and the network is associating those objects with Person.  Not necessarily a bad thing, but it would need to be trained about objects moving without people in order to separate the two.  BTW: Has Camect considering an unsupervised training model in order to speed up the learning cycles on mis-identifications?

 I worry also that all the specific "extra" classifications that are being added for "FedEx Truck, USPS, Skunk, Bear, etc" may also be diluting the NN.  Is the layer being increased along with the classifications being added?

[CamectChao]

Are they mostly at night? Should be caused by some recent training data. Several users complained about not detecting person during night.

The image quality is pretty low. We tried hard to avoid using those that might confuse the model, though.

Anyway, we'll make some algorithm changes to make false alerts like this less likely to happen. Will be released in a week or so.

[AAron nAAs]

Camect detected a strange person event !

I noticed within an hour.

A guy walked a bit info my driveway and started taking pictures of my neighbor's house, and then my house... acting suspicious the whole time and walked off.

Camect would never have detected him if he stayed on the sidewalk (ie: he crossed into my alert zone).

I could have created better snapshots now that I know Camect allows "take a snapshot" at better resolution that it shows in still video frames. I also increased the resolution of that camera afterward.

Police were interested, and glad to see Camect's video.

Was also easy to show NextDoor.com.

On Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 11:15:57 PM UTC-5, AAron nAAs wrote:

[Kevin Chung]

I'm testing a wireless Amcrest camera that is sitting on surface in the backyard (note the pruning shears handles in the background!  :-)   The camera last night detected a large spider as a cat.  LOL.