Glass break detection

nagar

Hi Ben. Crazy idea perhaps, but have you considered whether SecuritySpy could add glass break sound detection to its AI repertoire? That, plus AI motion detection, could perhaps replace most old fashioned analog home security services. We have found that even current generation dedicated glass break detectors are too unreliable to use due to false alarms from barking dogs. I bet you could fix that!

Ben

Thanks for the suggestion. While we don't have any kind of AI-powered audio detection at the moment, I agree that this would be a nice feature to add. I can imagine a few different classes would be useful - glass break detection being one of them. Dog bark detection would be useful in its own right I think, as well as perhaps shouting). We'll look into this possibility for a future update.

However, I don't think this could replace a dedicated burglar alarm that sounds a siren or calls the police. These are only useful if they are extremely resistant to false-positive detections - the more false triggers you have the more it will be ignored. Even the best AI audio detector will still give you false positives at a rate of a few percent, whereas modern dual-tech PIR sensors are orders of magnitude better than this. Audio-based glass break detection will be useful for things like triggering recording or lights, but leave the siren on the dedicated system.

nagar

Thanks, Ben. Perhaps there's better technology than we have, but our experience is that both dedicated alarm system motion and glass break detectors have unacceptably high false positive rates when you live with large dogs (greyhounds in our case). Our very smart alarm guy ultimately gave up on the problem, so we're left with nothing but entry door sensors.

The beauty of using SecuritySpy, to me, is the ability to rapidly consult interior video to distinguish false alarms from real ones before sounding the siren or summoning the local law enforcers. Granted, this won't always be possible. I also wonder if the AI (visual or audio) could have an "alarm" mode in which false positives are greatly reduced at the cost of some reduced sensitivity.

I hope you'll pursue the AI audio detection. It'll be very useful I'm sure. Though unsurprisingly around here the detection method with the lowest false positive rate is the greyhounds :-).