False Alarms

Sometimes the AI thinks someone is on the floor when no one is. That’s a false alarm. We try to minimize these, but they do happen.

AI looks at one image and tries to answer the question: Is someone on the floor? Anything low in the room can fool it now and then — things piled on the floor, a pet, a shape at the edge of the picture. When that happens you’ll get an alert saying someone might be on the floor. You’ll look yourself, see that no one is actually on the floor, and that’s the end of it.

A house with a lot of stuff

This house has a lot of stuff, so there are more chances for AI mistakes. There is no person in either image, but both of these generated alerts. And not every time. The AI might see the same image for 24 hours and only generate an alert a few times.

We ran these images through various tests to see what was fooling the AIs. This led to some changes to reduce such false alarms, but we know there will be other rooms in other houses that will cause false alarms.

A kitchen with a metallic tinsel skirt around the island and blue streamers overhead. No one is in the room.
Two AIs that we used to use would go for days with no problem on this image and then fire off a handful of false alarms. They always focused on the back of the sofa that is partially visible beyond the kitchen island. They also may have been fooled by the tiny table way in the distance by the back door.
A living room in black-and-white infrared: a couch with a walker and a fan resting on it, and an empty carpet. No one is in the room.
The living room early one morning, before the lights were on, so the camera was in infrared mode. The AI saw the shapes at the left edge of the picture as someone lying on the carpet. The AI also thought someone was standing in the kitchen, which was also wrong but a person standing does not generate an alert.

A house with a large dog

This house is fairly neat and tidy, but it has also generated some false alarms. Most of them were because there’s a large dog. A large dog lying on the floor — under a table, or in a dark room — can look somewhat like a person lying on the floor. We have worked to reduce false alarms due to large dogs.

And one false alarm had nothing to do with the dog. We tracked it down to the white pillow on the tan sofa somehow making one of the AIs think a person was sitting on the floor there, propped up against the sofa. Lighting also played a role (this did not happen in all lighting).

A living room at night in black-and-white infrared: sofas, a coffee table on a rug, and a dark shape — the dog — lying under the coffee table.
Our living room at night, in infrared. The dog is lying under the coffee table — the dark shape between the table legs. The AI read the dog as a person on the floor.
A living room in the evening with a lamp on: two sofas with pillows, a coffee table, and the kitchen beyond. No one is in the room.
The same room from the other camera, the same evening. No one is there. The AI took pillows on one of the sofas for a person — maybe with some help from the lighting.

A neat and tidy house

My step-mom’s house has never generated a false alarm. Knock on wood! She keeps her place very neat and tidy, so there isn’t much for the AI to misread. And she does not have a dog… much less a large dog.

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