[plug] open source video (burglar) surveillance

[Trevor Phillips]

On Wednesday 24 September 2003 23:06, Sacha Schlegel wrote:
>
> You probably came along http://motion.sourceforge.net/ a motion
> detection tool. I played with it at home but did not have a real use for
> it. Actually I would like to monitor who is stealing our eggs ;) We
> think its a raven. But would have to get a LONG cable for that, and make
> sure that the computer does not get wet.

I highly recommend motion. I did some experiments a few years ago with a 
Philips Webcam and motion, and set up a system where it would record grabs 
when it detected significant changes between frames - and assemble an mpg. I 
can't remember the details from memory, but I believe it had facilities to 
not trigger when only small objects (cats, birds, midgets) moved about.

One of the non-obvious (to me at the time anyway) things I learned from the 
whole thing: Get a camera with a high sample rate, and use that rate. You may 
think 10fps (or less) is fine, but the lower the fps, the more blurred the 
images were. Sampling at 30fps gave much crisper images of things in motion 
(such as a person walking around).

Here's a sample output mpg (681k) from October 2001:
   http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/temp/172414.mpg

If you watch the time log, you'll notice gaps - it didn't record frames when 
no-one was moving on camera. It's also not exactly real-time playback footage 
- was possibly more like 20fps than 30. ^_^

I was experimenting with this stuff with the excuse of perhaps putting it in 
one of our remote server rooms, hooked up to one of our Linux servers. It 
never did get put into use, but certainly would've been workable. 

A friend had a similar setup at home and got broken into - his pics of the bad 
guy were a little blurry, though. The cops appreciated the footage, but never 
caught the guy...

I still wouldn't mind setting up something like this at home. Perhaps watching 
my DVD collection. ^_^

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
 >--------------------------------------------------------------------<
| On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
 \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /

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