Sentinel Facial Recognition: Black Edition - Free for 3 cams

bp2008

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Hah. My brother shoveled the porch for 5 minutes right in front of the camera, wearing the same stocking cap as before plus some sunglasses. Sentinel never even detected a face. He never looked straight at the camera ... but still.
 

nats

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That is weid. Are you using your final license or the demo one?
 

tangent

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Hah. My brother shoveled the porch for 5 minutes right in front of the camera, wearing the same stocking cap as before plus some sunglasses. Sentinel never even detected a face. He never looked straight at the camera ... but still.
Something tells me you may get your brother to do quite a bit of shoveling in the name of experimenting with facial recognition this winter :rofl:
 

nats

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"Final" license.
Detection have to do with a couple different parameters:
1. Min face size, you can check that in the advance settings of the access point. This should be set to 100px. Do you think his face was bigger than that?
2. FPS, as we use more than one frame to confirm. more fps can help us make a detection which we might otherwise miss.
3. Color, the detector is trained on color pictures so training it with b/w images is not a good idea (i don't think this is affecting you though)

If you have the video/snaps and feel like sharing I could tell you exactly why he was not detected.
 

nats

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I found myself with quite a bit of free time this week in case someone wants/needs help with their install. Some of you have PM'd me but in case some of you are shy, know I actually have the time this week.
 

nats

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As @bp2008 noted, there is very little in terms of public documentation. I tried to remedy this a little bit by resurfacing an old blog we kept. Please let me know if there is something else you find difficult to undestand and I'l try my best to write a little bit about it.
PS: I will probably edit this post during the day adding more links.
 
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nats

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This thread (and the free time) have inspired me. I bought a NUC (no GPU) and will proceed to benchmark how much performance can I get out of the little one.

If any of you want to be part of the minimization efforts and have something like an i5 free, please contact me.

Also and on a related note. Has anyone used NUC's at all for your installs?

NUC: Intel® NUC
 

nats

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Thanks you guys!!!! All the feedback made it into the new release. If you have installed already, just run the installer with the upgrade option ticked.

Along the things that are new, you can now chose the resolution you want to use for facial (if you have a 4k camera you might choose 4MP for facial). Also a lot has been added to the documentation.

Keep letting me know where you think we should improve!

Download here. PM me for questions and for license details.

In other news, today I get the NUC, disc and ram, should be experimenting later tonight. Do you guys normally use SSD or HHDD?
 

bp2008

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I only use a NUC if space or power requirements are extremely tight, such as if it needs to run off-the-grid on batteries. Otherwise the cost is just too high compared to the performance, and the storage isn't very expandable. SSDs are still not very cost-effective when multiple TB of storage is required, but a lot of people get them anyway to install the OS on.
 

nats

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I really do not want to learn another operating system. Ubuntu.
Your message got me thinking and I have exciting holiday news!! Today I successfully ran full Sentinel Black in realtime in CPU on WINDOWS!

This means that in the short term there will be an install script and instructions for you guys and longer term there should be a windows visual installer.

I can of course make the scrappy version available way sooner than the installer so let me know if you are interested otherwise I'll hold until the final installer is ready.
The "manual process" basically includes installing one dependency (with visual installer). then follow a couple instructions to configure it and finally running a script on Power Shell.
 

nats

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I only use a NUC if space or power requirements are extremely tight, such as if it needs to run off-the-grid on batteries. Otherwise the cost is just too high compared to the performance, and the storage isn't very expandable. SSDs are still not very cost-effective when multiple TB of storage is required, but a lot of people get them anyway to install the OS on.
So far I'm liking it. I basically gave half the resources of the box to docker to run sentinel and kept the rest for windows. The form factor is a very appealing feature for me.

I installed both Ubuntu and Windows on it and it runs great on both, although it seems to me it runs a little faster in linux.
 

bp2008

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Yeah Windows is very heavy in many ways. It requires a ton of disk space and will happily gulp up 2 GB of memory all for itself, and there are several background processes which tend to eat up an entire CPU core for extended periods of time. And then the licenses aren't free so it is no wonder so many people don't use it for their servers.
 

nats

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Yeah Windows is very heavy in many ways. It requires a ton of disk space and will happily gulp up 2 GB of memory all for itself, and there are several background processes which tend to eat up an entire CPU core for extended periods of time. And then the licenses aren't free so it is no wonder so many people don't use it for their servers.
Which other OS would be interesting for you guys?
 

bp2008

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I'd say Ubuntu support is good enough. It is the only Linux distribution I ever bother with besides Raspbian (which is obviously unsuitable for this). Windows support might be nice for some, but this is the sort of thing I would typically run on dedicated hardware or in a dedicated virtual machine anyway, so the overhead and cost of running Windows is unnecessary.
 

nats

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Sentinel Now Available for Windows (Beta) << Notice the beta, feel free to report your problems.

Now it is possible to get sentinel running on CPU under windows.

In order to get it running, you will need to install one dependency manually.

Docker for Windows (Install Docker for Windows) is required by Sentinel to operate and should be installed in your computer prior to installing sentinel.

In order to install sentinel (and after having installed docker for windows) you will have to open CMD and type the following:

Code:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File <PATH TO INSTALLER>\install.ps1
This script will download sentinel and load it into your system.

Two other scripts are included, one to start the services and one to stop them.

Start Services:
Code:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File  <PATH TO INSTALLER>\loadServices.ps1
Stop Services:
Code:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File  <PATH TO INSTALLER>\stopServices.ps1
If you are wondering why the Execution policy parameter that is to allow this particular scripts to run on your computer this one time.

IMPORTANT ASSUMPTIONS:
0. You Successfully installed docker for windows.
1. Docker for windows should be configured with at least 8GB ram, and 4 cores
2. Your computer has a D drive with space to download and install sentinel (~10gb)
3. Your computer runs Windows 10 Pro (Required by Docker for windows)
4. Your version of windows 10 is up to date or at least the october 2018 update.

Download scripts here: LINK
 
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Robert M

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This may be a stupid question, but is there a central database of faces this can integrate with? I know by default it appears to be a complete standalone implementation. The reason I ask is that I'd want to use this outside of my business and would want to know when unsavory folks are loitering or trying to look in windows. The issue is I would never be able to identify them on my own and would just hope they show up in a database that grows over time.

Or is the intent of this software to really only be to positively identify folks that you already know are on your black/white list of faces?

At my house I might want to start uploading porch pirate footage that gets shared in my neighborhood to try and identify if those folks get near the house as well.
 

nats

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The issue is I would never be able to identify them on my own and would just hope they show up in a database that grows over time.
......

At my house I might want to start uploading porch pirate footage that gets shared in my neighborhood to try and identify if those folks get near the house as well.
We are actually working on having an option to share a detection (and the accompanying profile) to a shared db that people can opt to subscribe to or not. (The system works as standalone anyway without it but you could get started with and would grow over time. )

This way you could be subscribed to shares in your area and would not have to manually add profiles your neighbors already posted.
 
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