Yes, it is very resource-intensive, but in my admittedly limited testing thus far it has performed well. There were a few snags in getting it all running but
@nats was awesome and got everything straightened out quickly.
Here are more details for those interested.
I installed it in a virtual machine (4 vCPUs/cores, 16 GB RAM, 150 GB SSD) running in ESXi 6.7 on an i7-3770k CPU. The required OS is Ubuntu 16.04
desktop (as opposed to the Ubuntu server release, which can't run the installer). Notably, I haven't noticed its memory usage exceed 8 GB yet, so you don't necessarily need 16 GB.
There was a bit of a learning curve, as this software uses some concepts and terminology that may not be familiar. For example, what
Blue Iris would call a "Camera", Sentinel calls an "Access Point". I didn't need to configure anything more than the bare minimum required to load the stream. Camera type, IP, port, user name, password. Dahua was a pre-defined choice so I didn't even need to look up the video stream path. Once I added the camera ("access point") there was a toggle switch to, well, turn it on. I flipped that on, and just like that, Sentinel was analyzing the video stream for faces.
Now the camera I added was an 8 MP Dahua sending 15 FPS. This puts quite a load on the CPU even when there is nothing moving and no faces to analyze. Looked like about 25-33%. I had my brother walk outside to test it and the added load of recognizing the detected face raised CPU usage to 100% on all 4 cores. Fortunately the camera configuration lets you reduce the frame rate. Obviously this won't be as efficient as reducing the frame rate in the camera's web interface so that it encodes less video in the first place, but it works well enough for this purpose since the main CPU user here is the facial recognition, not the video decoding. I reduced it to the minimum allowed value of 4 FPS and we tried the experiment again. All cores usage got high, but not quite to 100%. Good enough. I don't know how well the system would cope with being maxed out for an extended period of time. Like if you had a camera pointed at a whole party of people for an hour. I'm guessing it would drop frames as necessary to not fall too far behind in image processing, but again, I did not test such a situation.
The interface as a whole could use a lot of polish. There are numerous minor style issues such as the rightmost button in the top bar missing its margin, or buttons overlapping each other when the browser window is narrow.
One stumbling point was at the event viewer page. It didn't show any events. As it turns out, this is because the default date filter has the start and end dates set to the same time, so you must first choose a start date before any events will actually show up. And you must do this every time you load that page.
Another issue, the interface tries to use a web socket to listen for new events, but the JavaScript by default attempts to connect to "localhost". This is fine if you view the interface from the same machine you installed it on, but if viewing remotely you need to edit a configuration file and change localhost to an IP address or other hostname. I strongly recommend that this be resolved in an update. I can't think of any reason why the script opening the web socket can't just look at the current address to determine the hostname to use for the web socket connection.
Teaching the software who each face belongs to is fairly straightforward if you click on unrecognized faces in the event viewer. But before I tried that, I floundered around for a while in a different interface page which claimed to be for teaching identities based on past events, but apparently lacked the ability to actually look up past events.
Much of the learning curve could be alleviated by good documentation, which I didn't find
any of.
Another fun quirk is that if you live-view a camera through Sentinel's web interface, the video is mirrored. Evidently, this is on purpose because someone thought it was more intuitive that way. I'm having flashbacks of when Skype started doing this and took away the option to switch it back to normal.
Anyway, that is all for now. This is certainly some very interesting software and I encourage anyone with the inclination and spare hardware to try it out.
