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Idea for Security using your iSight

walkingmac

walkingmac

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 30, 2003
261
0
Greater Cincinnati
Hey all, had a thought and wanted to get some feedback on it. Had an idea for a security app that uses your iSight to take pictures when motion is detected. idk if this is really possible, but think about it. If you are in a work situation where you want to know who is at your desk or at your room and you just know one of your siblings was messing around with your stuff, you will have pictures of them ready to look at when you get back to your computer of who was in there and when. Again idk if there is a capability of this being possible with existing technology, but it's a thought

Anyone else have any about this?
 
I think it's possible, but it would take a lot to pull off.

If somehow, some way, you could link a motion detector light (or some other motion detector device) to the iSight, this might work. The motion detector would take care of "knowing" when something moves, and the iSight could somehow receive a signal from that. Of course, having a motion detector light turn on might not be the most incognito solution, so perhaps you'd have a dead bulb in there. What would be important is for the iSight to pick up the signal from the motion detector, and to somehow interpret that, and thingies, and so forth.

I'm not an engineer, so I have not the slightest clue how feasible it would be to wire something up like this, but it seems like some serious talent might be able to pull it off.
 
it should be reasonably easy to have a program that captures a frame every .5 seconds and compares it to the previous frame - anything that has changed causes it to take a shot 0.1 seconds or something like that until the frames stop changing again.
 
well, actually, I was thinking more all software based. where the software could interpret a a change in what would be continuously showing of by a change in bit rate (ya I have no idea what that might mean, however i do 'know' that different amounts of motion/colors/etc create different bit rates).

Any thoughts on that?
 
nellrobinson: you got it. There is Windows software that will do exactly that, no idea if such a thing has been written for Mac & iSight (haven't looked, no need).
 
iMeowbot said:
nellrobinson: you got it. There is Windows software that will do exactly that, no idea if such a thing has been written for Mac & iSight (haven't looked, no need).
Click to expand...

OH YEAH!!! wow i am surprised that it made sense, shouldn't be to hard to do - i am sure their are a few bits of code that can be purloined, modified and combined to do the job. any offers?
 
Actually there are MANY programs that do this, or this and many other things. The most popular one is EvoCam (Google for it), but I remember an article on MacDevCenter.com awhile back that listed a bunch of them. Do a search for iSight over there and you'll find some good articles on using your iSight for security, interactive games, barcode reading, etc.
 
Another one is SecuritySpy, which is actually fairly slick. I ran the 30-day trial while we were on vacation since we were having work done on the house. Easy to set up an use.
 
It has already been developed, and people have already been caught by it. I'm not sure if anyone else remembers, but back when the iSite came out, there was a article about the iSite catching a theif. It was a school and it was having computer stuff go missing. So one of the secretaries set up her iSite to do video if it detected motion. Well, it turned out to me some students that some how had keys or something like that were coming in at night and stealing the computers. Caught them on the first night too, and could identify them from the great quality of the iSite.
 
I don't think anyone's mentioned Jitter, an extension of Max/MSP by Cycling '74. A little overkill for what you want to do, but a sweet software package for A/V. The video portion can do motion and color tracking and could easily pull off a record-on-motion setup. But the other shareware apps are a lot easier to use, most likely.

cpjakes
 
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