[TriLUG] OT: IP security cameras

[P. L. Charles Fischer]

OK, lets see if we can do this for as little cost as we can, which may not 
get you to Nirvana.

First to keep the cost down lets look at the camera options:

1) IP Camera that does what you need may be impossible. Color with JPEG 
output, no problem. Motion detection a strong possibility. Color with night 
vision, I have not seen one. A problem will be the interlaced image from 
most of the cameras. A low resolution (320x240) will not have interlace, 
but if you want higher resolution (640x480) you will need to find a 
progressive scan camera.

Another option is to use a mini-itx (see 
<http://www.mini-itx.com/>www.mini-itx.com, or look at old TriLUG e-mails 
for details) form factor board, with a cheap BT-484 based frame grabber. 
This will allow you to use about any NTSC or PAL camera with S-Video or 
composite output. The cost is about $350 for the mother board, power supply 
and frame grabber. There are two advantages to this approach, first is that 
you can find a camera that better suites your needs, and you have a lot 
more flexibility. The down side is more work and a lot more flexibility. 
Another small advantage is that you can grab single fields at 640 by 240 
resolution from a cheap interlace camera.

The last option is to use a digital camera and a mini-itx system. Look at 
<http://www.gphoto.org/>www.gphoto.org for supported cameras. This would 
allow you to snap images via USB or FireWire then save the images over the 
network at a very high resolution, but slow rate.

I have a program that runs on RedHat 9 that uses a BT-484 frame grabber and 
S-Video camera to do timing for bike time trials. It does adaptive 
background subtraction for the motion detection. It should be very easy for 
me to adapt it to your needs (at no cost, it is something I have been 
wanting to do anyway). The program does use proprietary image processing 
libraries, so I cannot give you full source code.  I can give you the C 
files and binary versions of the libraries.

Good luck
Charles Fischer

>Greg
>
>
>On Sunday, Sep 14, 2003, at 21:17 US/Eastern, P. L. Charles Fischer wrote:
>
>>I have a few questions about what you want to do with the camera.
>>    * Color or gray scale images?
>>    * Do you want motion detection?
>>    * If you want motion detection, do you want the camera to do it, or a 
>> sensor connected to the camera?
>>    * How many frames/second?
>>    * Type of image format (JPEG or PNG or other)?
>>    * How much will the light level vary?
>>    * How fast will objects be moving in the field of view?
>>-Charles Fischer
>>
>>
>>At 08:37 PM 9/14/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>>>I am researching IP based security cameras.  Does anyone have any 
>>>cameras in place and if so what are your thoughts?  Most of the cameras 
>>>I've seen thus far all have embedded web servers which is okay, but I 
>>>wanted one that would take pictures and save them to a network drive but 
>>>I'm not sure if any of these devices exist.
>>>
>>>Any thoughts?  Low power is best as I would hope to run power over ether 
>>>(and then split the power back out at the camera end).
>>>
>>>Greg