Canary brings person detection to its cameras to help avoid false positives

Canary’s finally bringing one of its most requested features to its full line of connected home security cameras. After spending some time in beta, person detection will be rolling out over the course of the next six weeks to all of the company’s existing customers.

The feature utilizes a combination of AI and machine learning the company calls “Canary Vision,” in order to differentiate people from other kinds of movements. As someone who’s tested both the standard Canary all-in-one and the more portable Flex, I can attest to the fact that a lack of intelligent detection was one of both products’ biggest downsides.

Putting the Canary in the room where my rabbit lives was a bad decision on my part. I was getting notifications every 10 minutes or so when she decided to have a hop about. Ditto for when a lot of sunlight poured into the room, casting shadows on the wall. I’m sure those who’ve installed a Flex outdoors have had even more issues with false positives. Ultimately, I ended up switching off notifications, which sort of defeats the whole purpose.

It will be interesting to check out — for obvious reasons, this is a really important feature to get right. And while the company is using ML to continually improve it, one mistaken identity could be a big bummer for an unfortunate home owner. The company will be offering more info on the feature at CES in a few weeks, and has promised more AI features rolling out over the course of next year.