How well has Sentry worked for me?

spammenotinoz

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Good observation. This is a known limitation with our 1.0 integration. We plan to take 3 frames per event in the next release which we are almost ready to share with BI. We plan to take frames at the MAKEtime setting, +1s, +2s. Another user suggested providing a visual in the clip or UI (TBD) as to which frame is sent to Sentry to help users adjust the MAKE time easily based on their scenario.

-- Sam from Sentry
Thank-you SAM for your response. I do acknowledge that I was a bit of a D' to test the above scenarios, and that Sentry is working in 90% + of the case, which is how it is being marketed.
I also find it beneficial to be able to disable\enable Sentry by BlueIris profiles, this provides some great flexibility.
I also have the option of keeping Sentry enabled for the daily reports ect... but keeping the existing SMS Alerts ect.. active.

Please keep up the great work.
 

DwightMorgan

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It would be nice if there was a feedback mechanism from within either the alerts or Blue Iris to let them know that something was accurate or not. Hopefully they could leverage that information to improve the analysis. I just subscribed, but there is room for improvement and additional options.
 

integlikewhoa

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It would be nice if there was a feedback mechanism from within either the alerts or Blue Iris to let them know that something was accurate or not.
This has been suggested many times, and their solution was to build a web interface on their website to do this. I think they are a bit disconnected from BI to keep all this in one place. BI doesn't even currently store or mark the frames sent to Sentry. I'm having a hard time adding a still image during a push alert with the right frames that show the person.
 

DwightMorgan

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The more I use it, the more I am finding the limitations... A lot of which are actually on the BI side. I would like to be able to pick which alerts use BI, as well as telling NOT to send over the unprocessed alerts. It would also be able to adjust the "sensitivity" or confidence levels. I am getting a number of false alarms so it would be nice to tune it to less sensitive at night when it wakes me up, and more sensitive during the day. This combined with sending over multiple snap shots would be gone.

Use Case:
All alerts go to email in the cloud in case the local storage is stolen (I am going to experiment with on reset options for this until more flexibility is added)
App notification of all Alerts during the day
Text Alert for"flagged" / analyzed alerts 24x7
local audio for "flagged" /analyzed alerts 24x7
 

varghesesa

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We will be taking multiple frames this quarter, i.e. before end of the year.

FYI, in the interim, I have been advising many customers to leverage BI's Zone (Area of Interest) feature. For example, for one customer, they had a camera facing the front door. The camera would trigger every time the door moved which is usually fine when someone is entering. However, if someone is exiting, the frame when the door is opening is way to early to capture the person leaving. I advised the customer to place a small zone in front of the walkway to the door. Traffic in and out of the house were captured!
 

spammenotinoz

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The more I use it, the more I am finding the limitations... A lot of which are actually on the BI side. I would like to be able to pick which alerts use BI, as well as telling NOT to send over the unprocessed alerts. It would also be able to adjust the "sensitivity" or confidence levels. I am getting a number of false alarms so it would be nice to tune it to less sensitive at night when it wakes me up, and more sensitive during the day. This combined with sending over multiple snap shots would be gone.

Use Case:
All alerts go to email in the cloud in case the local storage is stolen (I am going to experiment with on reset options for this until more flexibility is added)
App notification of all Alerts during the day
Text Alert for"flagged" / analyzed alerts 24x7
local audio for "flagged" /analyzed alerts 24x7
Schedules within BI are perfect for this use case.
I have 2 main schedules
[HOME] and
[AWAY]

Geofencing switches between home and away schedules. Basically AWAY sends mobile IOS alerts and HOME doesn't.
Then within each Schedule I have 2 profiles
DAY and NIGHT

Where a few of the features are different including sensitivity.
ie: During the day, scene changes don't set an alarm, where at night you don't want this or you miss torches, car headlights changing the entire scene.
My night profiles also have Night checked and lower sensitivity levels.

If you don't record always and just on motion (which isn't a good idea, but I acknowledge a lot of people do), then try, using zones.
Zone A, select everything
Zone B, select a subset to be alerted on
Then configure your alerts to alert on Zone B only. Any movement though will still trigger a recording in Zone A, just not an Alert and not Sentry.

In my conclusion Sentry is really just a daily summary, misses too many real alerts to be useful, but certainly does as claimed by reducing false alerts.

I have setup second camera feeds, that create a continuous timelapse video (of just motion events). Doesn't use any noticeable additional processing as I have these feeds triggered off the primary feeds, they don't do their own motion detection. These go into a different folder and provide a good daily animated summary of all alerts.

Many ways to do what you want, you can even have additional camera feeds just for sentry. Could even be a sub-Chanel to use lower CPU if that is of concern.

I have my sub-channels going into AWS IoT then Kinesis. Using a low frame rate, it doesn't consume much storage.
Using a very basic Dynamo DB database to store faces. This is all just off the shelf using the quickstart.
I don't have the time or the application knowledge to do anything overly useful.
 

DwightMorgan

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I have tried many options for reducing false alerts and had them set pretty good for only picking up cars and people. However, I want my normal triggers to pick up small to medium size animals, and only to get flagged alerts on my cell phone while still allowing the normal alerts to trigger other actions. I really hope they move the Human Alert away from the trigger settings and over to the alert settings.
 

varghesesa

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Hi Sam. Great to hear. When is that due to be released?
2019-Q4 for multiple frames. FYI, the image in the clip list from BI is now the image set by the MAKEtime. This is also the frame which is sent to Sentry for processing. Now users have instant feedback as to which frame is sent to Sentry.

-- Sam from Sentry.
 

varghesesa

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Multiple frames should be integrated with BI by 2020-Q1.

FYI, the image associated with the clip list is now the frame defined by MAKE time. This happens to be the exact frame sent to Sentry. Users can now see for themselves whether Sentry made a mistake or whether the right frame was sent to Sentry.

-- Sam from Sentry
 
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