Time-saving preview of surveillance videos
City View

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.
In my home city of San Francisco, hardly a day goes by without hundreds of cars, garages, and homes being broken into. Instead of getting upset about this, I tend not to keep anything of value in easily accessible places, and I have also installed security cameras so that I can peruse the video footage of thieves at work for my personal amusement.
Wireless, Even
Of course, installing a security camera is no easy task, because you need to install a cable and route it to the monitor. Although the camera itself often communicates wirelessly with the control panel, it still needs a power supply, and a power supply is not easy to come by in hotspots such as the underground parking lot or the stairwell.
Recently, a company called Arlo started to sell child-fist-sized, battery-powered cameras [1], which amateur detectives can simply hang up using a magnet (Figure 1). These pocket wonders wirelessly send recorded videos to a hub at a distance of up to about 100 feet, which in turn sends the data via the Internet to a server, from which a variety of smartphone apps or a website transfers the data to the user's screen on request.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.