Give AI Detection to Existing Customers

Hflorida

Reolink, you are obligated to make good on your promise to existing customers that you were selling us useful "motion detection".

You advertised your original motion detection as being useful when it's actually not useful outside of controlled lighting situations like indoors or night time with calm weather. It fails when facing rain, changing shadows and moving hot spots from sunlight, plants moved by wind. This is not really motion detection. I also discovered that even when the settings are perfect in an indoor situation, the motion triggers differently based on the skin tone and clothing color of a person. When a dark skinned person wearing dark clothes (my relative) passed across the entire room they did not trigger motion detection. A light skinned person in the same scene did trigger motion detection! My jaw dropped as I didn't expect this. Your marketing/advertising was misleading. Some might even call it fraudulent.

Currently I own a 16 channel Reolink NVR, and 16 cameras. When I heard you were getting AI functionalities, I was going to recommend your NVR to many more people and buy an additional 5 cameras until I heard that your new feature is only available on new products. I know that your cameras are Linux OS based and can all be upgraded with your AI changes if you chose to. There is no hardware limitation actually preventing the AI upgrade so you've decided to abandon your existing customers? I think you should reconsider. Have your business people look up what "life time value of a customer" means. I think they may have skipped that lesson in school.

Cynthia

We are very sorry for the inconvenience. We are working hard to improve our products. And we are very grateful for customer feedback. Can you submit this problem to our support https://reolink.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new? We will help you accordingly.

Hflorida

I have submitted info regarding the failure to your support group.

jchurchward

I agree with this OR if hardware cannot support it allow existing users a discount or trade in option please.

Gary D.

Hi

On a similiar subject, is there any possibility the RLC-520 camera will be upgraded to include the person/vehicle detection in the future? Or can it be upgraded to be a RLC-520A via firmware update?

Thanks

Jose

I strongly endorse the above comments about the need of some solution for giving AI to current customers. In fact, days ago I had an e-mail exchange with Reolink Support about the problem I'm having with *lots* of false alarms because of bad management of high contrast, sunshine and moving shadows (see attachment with so many alarms around noon time). After all, all my outdoor cameras around my country house face sunshine at one time or another. Support kindly told me that maybe I could wish to consider replacing the Argus series cameras with a newer AI model. However, I have to use battery-powered cameras, and the only AI model I know of is the new Argus 3 Pro, and morevover, although not so many as in Hflorida case, replacing five cameras with less of one year of use is not a cheap solution without some trade or discount offer, as jchurchward has proposed.

Argus2_playback-2021-01-30.png

Cynthia

Sorry that the RLC-520 cannot support person/vehicle detection with the firmware upgrade, since this feature is related to the hardware issue. It cannot use the firmware of RLC-520A because they have different hardware versions.

Cynthia

We also have POE cameras that support person/vehicle detection, for example, RLC-510A.

Gary D.

Overall I think the system is good but I also agree with Jose and others that the weakest area is the motion detection and it sounds like quite a few users have the same issues. In my case it depends on the weather conditions e.g.:-
- With static weather it works fine, however on a day which is sunny with patchy cloud, each time a cloud passes in front of the sun the entire scene gets lighter or darker so even if the sensitivity is low, because the entire scene has "changed", an alert is triggered.
- At night it's a different issue, on a clear night, works perfectly, but with light rain blown by the wind, droplets are lit by the light causing momentary flashes of light, similiarly with bugs flying near the camera.
Both these conditions can cause a lot of alerts, I don't need to know that a hundred clouds have passed by so I normally just disable the alerts for that day/night which means I wouldn't be alerted even if there was suspicious activity - not ideal.
I have no idea how good the AI motion detection is, but to be honest I am not too enthusiastic about paying to replace a system I've only just purchased.
If AI can't be added due to hardware constraints, I'm sure it could be improved so am trying to think of suggestions to make the non-AI motion detection work better for us, or is the AI motion detection the solution which R&D came up with for these issues, so not much work will be done to the non-AI systems going forward as it has already been addressed?

Thanks!

Crimp On

I agree entirely that there are obvious steps that could be taken to improve motion detection, such as:
* reporting the "number" that tripped motion detection. If I set motion detection at 41, it would
be helpful to know if something tripped it at 80 vs. 42.
* defining "how long" motion must continue to be reported. I would be happy to miss a bird flying
by for under 1 second.

james1549

I do like the video sharpness of the Reolink system (5mp) I have. But I can tell you that the Arlo system I had prior to this had much better motion sensor ability. My wife and I are both somewhat disappointed with the motion detection feature of Reolink. Definitely needs improvement.

James

Cynthia

Please allow me to explain briefly how the camera detection works: the camera detects the motion based on the image changes (the background) in each frame. So when the object reaches a certain degree the camera will be triggered. You can refer to https://support.reolink.com/hc/en-us/articles/900000624746-How-Does-Motion-Detection-Work
We are sorry to tell you that the problem cannot be avoided because of the working principle of motion detection. We have forwarded this issue to our R&D team and please believe that we are keeping improving the products.

Hflorida

Hello Cynthia,

I just read your explanation on how your motion detection works. Some suggestions for improvement:

1. Give the user the ability to set the min percentage, not just the max. This will allow us to tune the sensitivity to ignore small changes like leaves blowing in the wind and the shadow of leaves.
So instead of 0.5%-10% you could do 5%-10% if you want.

2. Let the max be up to 100% instead of just 10%. This will allow us to detect large changes which is useful if the detection area defined is a small part of the entire scene.

4. Make instructions for setting sensitivity more useful. I'm a senior software developer and I had problems understanding the instructions originally.

Crimp On

I believe what you intended to ask for was "allow the user to set the maximum motion in addition to the minimum".
i.e. the setting now is a number from 0 to 100. Any motion GREATER than this setting triggers "motion". Anything under does not. So, if the setting is "41", then 40 will not trigger, but 41 up to 100 will.

I very much like this idea. When a cloud moves across the sky and the entire picture changes at once, that is "too much".

I would like to see an explanation of why there can be "time periods" for sensitivity. Is it because color sensitivity is different from black & white?

I am also still want to see some measure of "time", both min and max. i.e. if a bird flies across the screen close to the camera, it may trigger "motion" that lasts only 1 second (of less). I would rather not watch 5 seconds of "pre-record", 1/2 sec of bird, then 15 seconds of "after-record".

Similarly, on football game days, we put out our college flag which waves constantly in view of the camera. After motion continuing for 30 minutes, maybe it's time to ignore it.

With ranges, the user can decide what they want to see, ranges of sensitivity and time both.

Cynthia

Thank you very much for your suggestions. We will for your suggestions to our R&D team to make improvements.
For the ”time periods” for sensitivity, during some time customers want to set a higher sensitivity so they can receive the alarm that is triggered by any movements, but sometimes they do not want the camera to be in high sensitivity because at that time the camera can be triggered easily by slight movement.

Jose

Although most of this thread (and the Cynthia explanation above) seems to apply only to cameras with "motion detection through image change" cameras, the "time periods" feature could and should also be applied to battery-powered ones using PIR sensors. If I'm right, in Argus cameras the chosen sensitivity is actually an all or nothing thing. I can schedule when detection runs but it will always do with the same selected value. I'm unable to define different sensitivity values for a chosen time period or moment of the day or set a sentitivity values range (instead of a unique value only) as well proposed above. I would say that more than a feasibility issue it is a matter of UI design. What is undeniable is that we all need a better performance in detection.

JP

I agree that Reolink has an obligation to significantly improve the motion detection on their non-AI systems. I had a RLK8-800D4, which is a modern 4K system, and I was very disappointed by the motion detection. It was useless. I spent months trying to tweak settings but in the end I turned off push notifications completely because even the sun coming out from behind a cloud would set off motion alerts, despite having set motion sensitivity to the lowest possible value of 1.

I'll take your word for it that the older cameras cannot be upgraded to with AI functionality, however, the software used by non-AI systems needs to continue to be developed to get a lot smarter to make the motion detection something other than useless. I feel bad because I recommended the same RLK8-800D4 system to a family member before realising that the motion detection on my own system was useless, and my family member is now exceedingly frustrated by it also.

The motion detection certainly doesn't live up to functionality that the product description suggests.

Cynthia

We understand that and really sorry for the inconvenience caused. I'll forward your feedback to our engineer. But due to the working principle of the D800 camera, the motion detection, it will pick up every motion. At present, we do not have a better optimization plan.

Cynthia

We understand that and really sorry for the inconvenience caused. I'll forward your feedback to our engineer. But due to the working principle of the D800 camera, the motion detection, it will pick up every motion. At present, we do not have a better optimization plan.

Cynthia

We understand that and really sorry for the inconvenience caused. I'll forward your feedback to our engineer. But due to the working principle of the D800 camera, the motion detection, it will pick up every motion. At present, we do not have a better optimization plan.