Add video surveillance to your Raspberry Pi PrivateEye Pi Dashboard

[Gadjet Nut]

Here is a preview of an up coming project to add video surveillance to the dashboard using a web cam. We have tested various web cam software applications on the Raspberry Pi and have decided to use Motion" (http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome).

 

Motion is highly customizable and easy to use. It uses motion detection to record video to a codec of your choice and also records stills, so you can got back and review video and stills using a media player. It will also stream the live video feed to a website, which makes it perfect for adding a live surveillance video feed to the alarm dashboard. We have installed the Apache webserver on the Raspberry Pi and found it is quite capable of being a webserver for surveillance. Motion also has the ability to call python scripts and can integrate with databases.

 

The surveillance resolution is dependant on your camera, cpu speed and network bandwidth so we are fine tuning these for a Raspberery Pi project. However we've been running a 352x288 for the past week without any issues.

 

The video does use a lot of disk space (1MB per 30 seconds of viedo at 352x288) so we will design a cron job to archive after X days.

 

Another aspect that we find important is for us not to host any information that is deemed private to our users. So all pictures and surveillance will be stored on the Raspberry Pi and not sent to our server. The dashboard video feed will come from the Raspberry Pi web server. Additionally we do not store home addresses or phone numbers so there si no link between your physical location and your PrivateEyePi user profile.

 

In order for use to connect to your Raspberry Pi from the WWW (for the surveillance) you will need to open up a port on your router. This is can be easy and complex, depending on your service provider and router.

 

Keep and eye out for this project, or joing the discussion group and you will receive email update.

 

As always feedback is welcome.

 

Here is a picture of our Surveillance PIR (more details in the next post):

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jacob K]

Looking forward to this progressing.

[Gadjet Nut]

These are the tutorials we developed subsequent to this post (2013):

http://projects.privateeyepi.com/home/webcam-surveillance-project

[Jacob K]

I noticed those tutorials already, but they don't put the stream onto the dashboard. I already have a decent security camera set up using Motion, but it would be ideal to put that stream onto the PrivateEyePi dashboard when I get to putting that alarm system together to complement the camera.

It would also be ideal to have the potential for more than one stream on the dashboard as well (front door, garage, rear door, etc) for better coverage.

[Gadjet Nut]

Hi Jacob,

The tutorial does show you how to view the surveillance feed over the internet using a browser. We did consider displaying it on the dashboard but that would require us to build some security layers so our users can protect their ipaddress and port of their surveillance camera.

I think displaying multiple screens in a single browser view should be a fairly simple piece of web development.

Regards,

Jonathan