topic Arlo Essential Activity Zone behavior in Arlo Essential Wire-Free Cameras

Arlo Essential Activity Zone behavior

tdave365 — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 16:15:27 GMT

I am concerned that Arlo Cameras (and in particular Arlo Essential cameras) cannot concurrently process information outside the activity zone and process a genuine detection at the same time. Does anyone know anything about this?

I have cameras pointed at high traffic areas and they are constantly detecting, processing, and discriminating activity outside the set activity zones. If the cameras are busy doing all of this all of the time, I am worried they are not processing people walking into the activity zones as they are supposed to.

Re: Arlo Essential Activity Zone behavior

StephenB — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:15:57 GMT

@tdave365 wrote:

I have cameras pointed at high traffic areas and they are constantly detecting, processing, and discriminating activity outside the set activity zones. If the cameras are busy doing all of this all of the time, I am worried they are not processing people walking into the activity zones as they are supposed to.

To clarify how this is done -

The camera is simply detecting motion using its PIR (passive infrared) sensor. Whenever motion is detected, it streams video to the Arlo Cloud for analysis. The Arlo Cloud determines if the video is in-zone (or not) and supresses the video and notification if it is out of zone. The Cloud also determines the smart classification.

In my experience the processing isn't perfect, but that is not because the camera is overloaded.

But if the camera is detecting a lot of motion, then you won't get very good battery life. Activity zones won't help that (since as described above, the video is always streamed to the cloud, whether it is in-zone or not).

Re: Arlo Essential Activity Zone behavior

tdave365 — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:56:33 GMT

Whoops, I think I see your point.

The discrimination isn't happening at the camera -- all motion is being sent to Arlo. I actually understood this (in fact I find myself speaking to this point to others when it comes to burning batter juice) but didn't realize it was answering my own question with the same understanding.

I've been thinking of it as a separate process, but it isn't -- it's all the same process. 😛