The Sysadmin’s Daily Grind: Surveillance with Motion

Fish Spotting

Article from Issue 50/2005
Author(s):

Commercial surveillance systems are expensive and typically involve maintenance agreements. I thought there must be a low-budget alternative.

Olli and Melanie, two good friends of mine, have three stores. One of the stores has been broken into many times. Of course, they are insured against break ins, but they were concerned by the fact that nobody had been able to nail the culprits. They wondered if a surveillance system might help. Of course, turnkey surveillance systems are expensive, so my friends asked me if an old PC and a webcam would do the trick. Now, I do own a webcam, but up to that point I had only used it to point at the aquarium in my living room. I had no experience whatsoever with surveillance applications. But hey, that’s what search engines are for. After a short search, I had soon found a useful application called Motion [1].

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • PiCam Surveillance

    The new PiCam camera for the Raspberry Pi delivers image data with very little overhead, making it ideal for video surveillance applications. We find the bumps in the road you'll encounter and show you how to smooth them out with a few Linux commands and pipes.

    more »
  • Motion Detection

    The motion detector software, Motion, monitors the video signal from one or multiple cameras and is able to detect whether a significant part of the picture has changed, record and track movement, or launch arbitrary external commands to trigger other actions.

    more »
  • Surveillance with NAS

    Take advantage of the low watt per operation compute power offered by modern NAS to monitor your cameras.

    more »
  • Perl – Video Preview

    Rather than stare at boring surveillance videos, in which nothing happens 90 percent of the time, Mike Schilli tries the OpenCV image recognition software, which automatically extracts the most exciting action sequences.

    more »
  • Enlightened libcoap

    Charly did a spot of shopping in a furniture store and came out with a smart lighting system that he has now automated with a Linux PC: Read on for further enlightenment.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus

Visit Our Shop

Trial Subscription

Digital Subscription

Subscribe

Direct Download

Read full article as PDF:

Charly_Column.pdf (200.21 kB)

Linux Administration

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Events Hardware Linux Linux New Media Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source