My Nest Cam IQ is picking up Tree Von Spookyface
One of the great things about Nest and why I went pretty hard into the ecosystem on my own dime is that it’s not just motion detection, it’s people detection, facial recognition, and then somewhat smart alerts.
TL;DR – it’s a tree mother’fer!
So far it’s been pretty good, and I’m told that it will get better as time goes on, but a couple of nights ago I was alerted that there was talking and a person in my backyard.
The image I awoke to looked vaguely like an older man looking slightly to the right and the audio that was recorded sounded something like a dull moaning. This was a fun alert to get at 4:55am.
I ran through the camera footage to make sure there wasn’t a zombie attacking my house and decided that there must be a guy way off in the neighbor’s yard.
I got an alert later in the day that he was back and in the exact same position, and later still. I finally realized that it when the wind blows, something of a face appears in the tree limbs and zoop zoop, alarms go off.
I’ve named him Tree Von Spookyface for the moment, and I think I’ve spotted a shortcoming in the Nest software of there’s no way to ignore notification of someone it already knows.
I’m going to zone off the area of the face and set it to no alarms, or point the camera down a bit.
The moaning audio evidently is a jet plane and a dog who’s been arguing something with a squirrel, but not barking.
