Cam-eye: An Affordable Real-Time Video Surveillance Solution

Academia and industry have been attracted around the topic of video surveillance because of its importance to security. Using Video Surveillance, unauthorized activity can be monitored and corrected. Accidental mishaps can be recorded and later evaluated and analyzed. Event happenings can be placed in their correct chronological order. The mere fact of the existence of video surveillance discourages criminals from violent or unauthorized activity such as theft, vandalism, and various illegal felonies. We present Cam-eye, a Video Surveillance solution that is inexpensive to build and deploy. Our solution incorporates color, infrared, and thermal cameras. The live video feed can be accessed via VPN through HTTP or via our freely available iOS app. Our framework has been tested with many general purpose networked cameras as well as cameras that are built based on the Raspberry pi computers. We provide efficient software where high definition video can be transmitted in real time. We also present efficient alarm triggering algorithms that are used with our framework. These algorithms take advantage of the H.264 encoding scheme to implement otherwise computationally expensive motion detection algorithms. These algorithms can now run in real time on one of the most inexpensive single board computers such as the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero.