False Alarms

Sometimes the AI thinks someone is on the floor when no one is. And sometimes the person actually was on the floor briefly... for instance to pick something up. If you receive an alert for these, they are considered false alarms.

There are ways to minimize false alarms... using the Alert Strictness setting, or by changing camera angle, or by de-cluttering the area being monitored.

Frivolous false alarms

Here are two false alarms where the system did exactly what it should. I was briefly on the floor to pick up dog hair, and I had the system set to Alert Strictness level 0 (not strict at all). The next level up (1 - our standard setting) will wait briefly to see if the person is still on the floor before sending an alert.

A person kneeling on a living room floor near a sofa while picking up dog hair.
A person crouching near a doorway while picking up dog hair.

A very lived-in house

There’s a lot going on in these images, so there are more chances for AI mistakes. The AI would occasionally think that a person is way back where the sofa is located (in the first image), or on the far left edge of the second image.

These false alarms stopped when my brother set his Alert Strictness to level 2.

A kitchen with a metallic tinsel skirt around the island and blue streamers overhead. No one is in the room.
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.

A large dog, or furniture that fools the AI

In the first image there’s a large dog under the coffee table. She got mistaken for a person now & then. We have largely solved the dog-as-person error. In the second image, and only with the camera’s night vision, our “Specialist AI” occasionally saw legs of the coffee table as a person.

Alert Strictness level 1 largely stopped this false alarm (the second image), but it still got through twice in one night, so I moved the Alert Strictness up to level 2.

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.
A living room at night in black-and-white infrared: sofas and an empty coffee table with its legs visible. No one is in the room.

Sitting on the edge

We want our system to spot someone sitting on the floor because people like my mom never sit on the floor voluntarily. But this also results in some false alarms in my home when I sit on the edge of a sofa or chair, especially if the camera cannot see all of me clearly.

My seating position in the first image (sofa) used to cause daily false alarms because I like working there, but the false alarms dropped to zero when I set my Alert Strictness to level 1 or 2.

And in the second image (chair facing desk), there were no false alarms for two weeks and then one night a false alarm. Probably a combination of lighting and my terrible posture. This was solved with Alert Strictness level 3... or me just accepting that if I sit there like that at night, I may get a rare false alarm.

My mom and step-mom never sit like that so it’s basically a moot point, although this might be an issue in households with mixed ages.

A person sitting on the front edge of a sofa, leaning forward over a coffee table to use a laptop.
A person sitting on the front edge of an office chair at a desk, in a dimly lit room at night.

A difficult false alarm

This is perhaps the hardest false alarm we’ve seen so far, and it demonstrates how AIs can be fooled and how there can be very different solutions.

Some of the AIs look at this image and they see lower legs and feet, and because they can’t see the rest of the person, they conclude that she must be lying on the floor around the corner of the sofa. Other AIs simply do not see anyone at all.

This can be solved two different ways:

  1. We can use the highest level of Alert Strictness in our system, which causes the AIs to conclude that no one is there. This eliminates the false alarm, but it also misses a noticeable number of real on-the-floor cases.

OR

  1. BETTER: We can raise the camera so the system can see more of the person sitting on the sofa. This is the much better solution. It stops this false alarm without lowering the ability of the system to alert us to someone on the floor.
A camera view of a person sitting on a sofa, with only her lower legs and feet visible beyond the far side of the sofa.

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