Cameras not recognizing animals anymore

[entropy_zero]

Since a few months the "Smart" AI feature is not recognizing animals anymore.

Doesn't matter if night or day, birds or cats. All animals get classified as Person or Motion. Tech support made me reinstall the app, log out on devices etc. despite class inference being done on Arlo Servers - so i don't know what that is supposed to do.

Sent in video files as example, also donated a bunch of videos.

This was working fine before.

This is really infuriating, i payed several hundreds of Euros for the cameras, i pay a monthly subscription fee and the whole system is virtually useless - I can't turn it on, or else I will be woken up every night by a cat roaming around the house.

Apparently others have the same problem, yet nothing is done since 2024.

I am not able to reach Live-Chat for the last few days as well.

[jguerdat]

Well, the whole US was on holiday for the annual 4th of July so I guess the support team may have been out.

Start by toggling all appropriate Smart notifications off and back on to see if that helps.

[entropy_zero]

Thanks for your reply. Forgot to mention that i did this as well several times. Basically did all the usual "problem solving" i.e turning things on and off again etc.
Like i said, the video apparently gets uploaded to the cloud where class inference is done, but the result is simply always wrong for animals. Not much i can do on my side here.

[jguerdat]

WHat happens if only Animals is selected? I doubt that would help but...

[entropy_zero]

I simply get no notifications then.

[jguerdat]

Official support is needed. Now that the US is back to work you should be able to access them normally. I'll still tag the mods here to see if they can help: @JamesC , @ShayneS , @BrookeN 

[StephenB]

---

@entropy_zero wrote:

I can't turn it on, or else I will be woken up every night by a cat roaming around the house.

---

You might try tuning the motion sensitivy.  Walk in the area you want detection while running the motion sensitivity test and find the lowest threshold that detects you reliably.  Then set the actual threshold a bit above that value.

That might be low enough to keep the cat from triggering the camera.

[entropy_zero]

Thank you for your reply. I know that this is a possible workaround, but i have to cover a fairly large area and turning down the sensitivity has given me undesirable coverage.
Honestly i just want the classification feature to work again like it used to - since this is part of why i pay for this service.

[entropy_zero]

So technical support has basically given up, or rather never really looked at the problem.

First they explained that this feature is continuously getting improved as it learns from more examples. Obviously the exact opposite is the case. It was working perfectly a few months ago, now almost everything gets classified wrong.

Apparently no offline interference with their model was done on the video i sent in - which would have yielded some information imho but what do i know.

They recommended disabling the animated preview on my cameras so that notifications include a static frame showing exactly what triggered the alert. Then I could reposition the camera or obscure the view to avoid false positives. Seriously? It is triggered by things right dead center of the camera. I guess i could cover the entire lens..

So to summarize "They have no direct solution".

Im kinda counting on the community for help on this one to be honest.
Sorry if im venting a little but this just made me furious.

[BrookeN]

I would be more than happy to have someone look into this further for you. Can you please dm me a good callback number as well as a good time to call?

[entropy_zero]

Sorry, I have been on vacation.

But I have a small update on the case. I wanted to try one last time and reset all cameras. So I removed them from the app again, reset with the button inside the case for 15 seconds and re-added them to my account.
Then with all smart notifications turned ON, I suddenly get a notification on my phone with "Animal recognized" (correctly). I was thrilled, However I noticed that when I watch my phone, I first get a notification "Motion detected" (which also triggers the sounds etc.) and only a few seconds later the text of the notification changes to "Animal".

If I turn off the smart notifications for animals again (which is what I want) - no animal gets recognized again.

Different than before, but still not there yet. Does that help?

[jguerdat]

That is the normal behavior. You get an immediate notification of something happening but then the servers receive the video and process it to determine that the subject was an animal.