Battery Spot Light Cameras more false triggers by trees (only during day)?

For the outside of my house I have a wired Spot light, Wire Spotlight, and two Solar Spt light Cameras. The two wired cameras I get very little in false triggers. They are great at even spotting a stray cat in our landscaping. But my two Battery Spot light cameras on the side of our house (no plugs close enough to do wired) get tripped 20-30+ times a day even at the lowest setting for motion. I know the Battery version’s use only IR to spot motion but since trees give off little IR I am not sure why motion is getting triggered so much. I am guessing it is the tress because that is the only thing I see moving in the video.

Once side of my house faces West and the other faces East, and I noticed the false triggers are wrose when the sun it on that side of the house.

I have adjusted the zones and put them to the lowest motion settings and I still get all the notifications. What gets to me is that for my wire spotlight camera there are trees that are closer and larger and it does not trip that camera at all. I just want to get my camera setup to get less faulse trip less.

Thanks for any help.

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The thing about trees and IR is that A) trees draw water up to the top of the tree and all the leaves. This water warms up in the sun, and the wind can cause it to act as a moving thermal mass. And B) trees can block out the infrared radiation from the sun, and again, when the wind blows, the trees move exposing the sensor to heat, again simulating motion.

Unfortunately, with passive infrared (PIR) motion detection like the battery cameras use, trees + wind can pose issues. Beyond reducing sensitivity about all you can do is aim them further down, trying to get as much of the trees out of the primary view of the camera as possible.

The reason the wired devices don’t have this issue is because they are always on, so they can just analyze the video. But that would kill battery cameras in just a couple days, and even solar panels couldn’t keep up with the power draw.

However! I don’t know exactly when it’s coming, but per a Ring announcement email a few months back, battery cameras are supposed to be getting a sort of false alert rejection, which would be a hybrid-cloud solution. Basically, it would still activate and begin uploading as normal, but if the first few frames don’t indicate actual motion, it will cancel the recording (saving battery) and not issue the alert to the user (saving sanity).

I don’t know exactly when this will be rolling out, but it was listed as sometime in 2019. That won’t help today, but hopefully it will arrive sooner rather than later and help cut down a lot of false alerts with battery drives devices and the low-power, but also low-accuracy PIR motion detection.

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