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.
Conservative Operation
To reduce the load on the four lithium batteries powering the camera so they can last for about one month, the camera is allowed to wake up about a half a dozen times a day if it detects motion in its vicinity and then transfer a one-minute video. You then download the movie from Arlo's website (Figure 2) to see thieves, say, dragging your new bike out of the garage. You typically only see motion at the beginning of a surveillance video, the rest of the one-minute footage normally shows nothing but motionless background (Figure 3).
Fast Forward to the Action
"Cut to the chase," people say when someone fails to come to the point. This probably refers to action films, where the audience does not want to see long-winded, suspense-building scenes but prefers to fast-forward to the car pursuit at the climax of the Hollywood production.
In this sense, it would be nice for the software to scour the video for frames in which a subject actually moves through the scene, so that the viewer knows whether the videos are worth watching and, if so, the location to which to fast forward in the video.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
News
-
Apple M1 Hardware Support to be Merged into Linux Kernel 5.13
Linux users will be able to install their favorite distribution on Apple’s M1-based hardware.
-
KDE Launches the Qt 5 Patch Collection
To support and maintain a stable Qt 5 for KDE Gears and Frameworks, KDE will maintain a patch collection.
-
Linux Creator Warns Next Kernel Could be Delayed
Linus Torvalds has issued concern about the size of kernel 5.12 and possible delays for its release.
-
System76 Updates its Pangolin Laptop
System76 has released a much-anticipated AMD version of their most popular laptop, the Pangolin.
-
New Debian-Based Distribution Arrives on the Market
TelOS is a new Debian-based Linux distribution with a customized, touch-screen-ready KDE Plasma 5 desktop.
-
System76 Releases New Thelio Desktop
One of the most ardent supporters of open source hardware has released a new desktop machine for home or office.
-
Mageia 8 Now Available with Linux 5.10 LTS
The latest release of Mageia includes improved graphics support for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.
-
GNOME 40 Beta has been Released
Anyone looking to test the beta for the upcoming GNOME 40 release can now do so.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 has Arrived
The latest stable version of OpenMandriva has been released and offers the newest KDE desktop and ARM support.
-
Thunderbird 78 Ported to Ubuntu 20.04
The Ubuntu developers have made the decision to port the latest release of Thunderbird to the LTS version of the platform.