Wyze Cameras Add New “Person Detection” Feature for Notifications and Searches

An update to Wyze cameras allows users to be notified only if people are visible.

If you’re using a security camera at home, you’re dealing with hundreds of hours of video a week. But if you need to retrieve any of it, you might only be interested in the bits with humans. Wyze gets that.

To help deal with constant live and recorded video, the company is rolling out “Person Detection” to its inexpensive cameras. With this feature enabled, the Wyze app will notify the phone app when a human walks into the frame of one of the cameras connected to your home network. Users can also search through recorded video, highlighting only the portions that include a human.

This sort of detection is much harder to automate than you might think—most of the consumer-facing software in the area has been focused on, well, faces. Wyze’s press release says that the company has partnered with Seattle-based software firm Xnor (pronounced Ecks-nor, not Znore) to perform AI processing on the Wyze Cam itself, no cloud server required.

Wyze says the person detection feature will reduce the number of false positives its users receive from the Wyze Cam v2 and Wyze Cam Pan. The feature will roll out in a firmware update starting today.

Michael Crider Michael Crider
