What is your experience with Sentry?

[varghesesa]

Also, not sure if this is within the realm of possibility with your AI, but object black listing and white listing with service side stored meta data would be truly awesome. I believe Rekognition only does this with faces but it would be cool to be able to white list all of our cars and our neighbors cars based on shape, color, license plate, faces, etc to filter out those notifications. i.e. I'd like to be able to walk around my property and not have it send me notifications of myself or my family.....or do, but tag them with the known identity and then I can do my own filtering on the receiving end and apply rules like when my daughter isn't seen in one of our 6 cameras in the front within x minutes after school to notify me....again that would be a filter of my own implementation.

It's like you read our roadmap! Identifying homeowners and residents and labeling them is on our roadmap so we can start delivering proactive alerts such as "kids are home". We are still experimenting how to do this correctly. More to come.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[varghesesa]

Bump...

Can you open a ticket with Sentry? Not sure what's going on here.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[sorka]

It's like you read our roadmap! Identifying homeowners and residents and labeling them is on our roadmap so we can start delivering proactive alerts such as "kids are home". We are still experimenting how to do this correctly. More to come.

-- Sam from Sentry

Also, depending on the plugin architecture that was implemented in BI to allow you to integrate, allowing the customer to configure how alerts are handled for each alert type including whether or not Sentry is the sole consumer of an alert type could be handled by a customer configuration page on your site directly eliminating the need to tweak BI's native UI to handle ever changing and evolving features.

 

[varghesesa]

When I got home tonight, I started going through the alerts for the day and noticed that Sentry is only picking up about 1 in 4. Odd thing is the ones it does pick up aren't particularly always super easy and plenty of clips with really easy no-brainer-clear-human-right-in-the-center examples aren't being tagged by Sentry.

Here are a few examples. Each clip has multiple motion events non of which were tagged by Sentry:




Also, there's a 100% failure rate any time someone pulls up in a vehicle and gets out. It's almost like there's just a single frame sent when motion detection starts which will almost always be something other than a person...in the vehicle arrival examples. Still there are other examples, like the second video above where Sentry did not mark the human.

Great analysis. You have pointed out some of the weaknesses in our 1.0 release. Sentry works off the Maketime setting to determine which frame to analyze (default = 1.0s). You alluded to the problem with vehicles. Your camera picks up on the motion so far in advance of the UPS driver walking up to the house that no person is ever detected. Workarounds would be to focus the camera on the walkway right now.

For the missed person, it does seem there is a clear enough view of the person for our computer vision to detect a person. Seems like a false negative, i.e. we missed the person. If you go to Sentry and open a ticket, we can investigate further.

For future integrations, we plan to improve the detection by leveraging more frames. We hope to have an on-prem solution down the road which processes the video. Then all these errors would go away.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[varghesesa]

One other very frequent issue is that the image attachments on the MMS seem to be from a point in the video either before or after the person passed through it so the image attachment doesn't show who it was.

You are correct. This is a known issue. Right now the image being sent in the alert is not the image that was processed by Sentry. This will be fixed in the next release.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[varghesesa]

I decided to purchase after some tweaks with my B.I. configuration.

Question: How did you manage to purchase? When I click the 'Learn More' link within the Camera>Trigger tab, my browser opens up to the page. However clicking the 'Subscribe' button does nothing at all for me. I've tried in both Edge and Chrome. Do I have to wait until my trial period expires?

When you scroll down on the landing page of the 'Learn More' link, you should see payment options.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[sorka]

Great analysis. You have pointed out some of the weaknesses in our 1.0 release. Sentry works off the Maketime setting to determine which frame to analyze (default = 1.0s). You alluded to the problem with vehicles. Your camera picks up on the motion so far in advance of the UPS driver walking up to the house that no person is ever detected. Workarounds would be to focus the camera on the walkway right now.

For the missed person, it does seem there is a clear enough view of the person for our computer vision to detect a person. Seems like a false negative, i.e. we missed the person. If you go to Sentry and open a ticket, we can investigate further.

For future integrations, we plan to improve the detection by leveraging more frames. We hope to have an on-prem solution down the road which processes the video. Then all these errors would go away.

-- Sam from Sentry

It seems like the only long term solution going forward is to feed more frames, like at a least 1 a second back to the service. I know that will probably increase costs some but hopefully it scales non linearly.

 

[No5]

When you scroll down on the landing page of the 'Learn More' link, you should see payment options.

-- Sam from Sentry

Yup, this is where I said I am....clicking the Subscribe button does nothing for me.

 

[varghesesa]

Yup, this is where I said I am....clicking the Subscribe button does nothing for me.

When you go to the trigger dialogue in BI, do you see a "sentry_id: xxx" in between the checkbox and the Learn more link?

 

[No5]

When you go to the trigger dialogue in BI, do you see a "sentry_id: xxx" in between the checkbox and the Learn more link?

Yes, with all my camera's (each with it's own identifier).

The trial is working fine for me at the moment.

Just this darn Subscribe feature on the site itself.

I opened up a support ticket with Sentry since posting here....

 

[varghesesa]

Yes, with all my camera's (each with it's own identifier).

The trial is working fine for me at the moment.

Just this darn Subscribe feature on the site itself.

I opened up a support ticket with Sentry since posting here....

Perfect! Support will resolve it. Appreciate the patience.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[sorka]

Well this is getting very strange. The last Sentry tagged event occurred today at 10:25 am. I just got home to review the logs and realized there was a 100% failure rate after that. I checked the 3 cameras I'm testing with and the Sentry checkbox was off on all three!!!!

In addition, even though the Sentry check boxes were off, I got no push notifications all day for any of the regular motion events which I would have expected had I turned Sentry off.

 

[varghesesa]

Well this is getting very strange. The last Sentry tagged event occurred today at 10:25 am. I just got home to review the logs and realized there was a 100% failure rate after that. I checked the 3 cameras I'm testing with and the Sentry checkbox was off on all three!!!!

In addition, even though the Sentry check boxes were off, I got no push notifications all day for any of the regular motion events which I would have expected had I turned Sentry off.

We need to investigate. Do you mind opening a ticket for engineering to review?

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[pmcross]

My experience is a little strange. The check box for Sentry once set, only sticks for a while. When I check later, the check box is empty.

I am controlling BI externally through various events, such as changing profiles, enabling or disabling motion and enabling or disabling cameras. But no events have triggered in the hour since I made sure each camera had Sentry checked in the BI Trigger tab.

I have 8 cameras with 2 profiles that I want Sentry checked. Have I met some limit? I purchased a year of service.

Any ideas?

I had this same issue. When you check the Sentry box and then copy/paste to other profiles the Sentry check box doesn't get checked for the other profiles. You need to go to each profile and manually check the Sentry check box.

 

[pmcross]

We decided to work off of Maketime on this version. We will evaluate other ideas to continuously improve results.

-- Sam from Sentry.

How is the image handled if your make time is 3 or 4 seconds? Are multiple images sent to Sentry? Just trying to understand better.

 

[varghesesa]

How is the image handled if your make time is 3 or 4 seconds? Are multiple images sent to Sentry? Just trying to understand better.

With the current implementation, we only take one frame defined by the Maketime. We have received many suggestions such as taking multiple frames, e.g. at Maketime intervals so every 1 sec if the Maketime is 1 sec. Need to work through trade-offs between accuracy and bandwidth before the next release.

-- Sam from Sentry

 

[pmcross]

@varghesesa is there a portal that I can log into to see how many days I have left on my trial?

 

[JNDATHP]

I had this same issue. When you check the Sentry box and then copy/paste to other profiles the Sentry check box doesn't get checked for the other profiles. You need to go to each profile and manually check the Sentry check box.

I’ve done that and they stick for a while. The next morning or later in the day, they are unchecked. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[sorka]

Mine unchecked without doing anything in between. I didn't even restart and I didn't edit any profiles. They were just unchecked.

 

[varghesesa]

I’ve done that and they stick for a while. The next morning or later in the day, they are unchecked. Thanks for the suggestion.

Apologies. There is an integration issue between BI and Sentry. We created a workaround. All checkboxes should now remain checked!

-- Sam from Sentry