Is Cheap Video Surveillance Possible? 700
timholman writes "After a series of burglaries and auto break-ins in my neighborhood, I'm thinking about adding some video security cameras to my home. To me, the object isn't just deterrence — if someone tries to break into my house or my car (parked on the street in front of my house), I'd like to provide a high-quality image of the perpetrator to the police. Inexpensive video surveillance systems, with their atrocious image quality, are nearly useless. The problem is being able to get good image quality at an affordable price. After some research, I've decided that using network cameras to FTP images to a central server over a HomePlug network is the best solution. However, good megapixel network cameras (e.g. Stardot or Axis cameras) can easily cost more than $1,000 each. Has any of you dealt with a similar situation? Is there any way to get reasonable quality (preferably open source) daytime and nighttime video surveillance equipment for home use without paying an arm and a leg? Is it better to go with a couple of expensive cameras, or a multitude of inexpensive cameras? Is paying two to three thousand dollars simply unavoidable if I want to monitor my front and back yards?"
Here is a start... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to do something similar at a previous residence, but found that I would have to worry about people stealing the camera, or simply wearing a mask and gloves when they break in, which will really render the best camera useless. In the end, I used a hidden cheap Linksys webcam that was discreetly hidden inside my house, enough to alert me and catch a careless criminal.
I have also had good success with the D-Link products, which are very cheap.
http://www.dlink.com/products/category.asp?cid=60&sec=0 [dlink.com]
Also, keep in mind that making your house / area "different" may actually attract more attention. Numerous cameras outside a particular residence screams "important stuff here" if you can't hide them effectively.
Good images are important (Score:5, Interesting)
I sat on a grand jury a couple years ago. (Not an investigatory one; we issued general felony indictments. The county I live in does things a little oddly -- they have a pair of standing grand juries, each of which meets once a month to hear potential indictments. You're on the jury for a year, and hear a couple dozen cases each day, so I saw a bunch. All felony indictments go through one of the two.)
The most common case for small time burglary was that there would be a set of crimes that the police were convinced were related, and then finally the thief would hit some place that had video cameras that were placed well enough to produce a usable image -- at which point, odds were they had already had dealings with that person, and the case got fairly easy. So usually they would present it to us as an indictment for just the one crime, but explain that the investigation was being treated as part of a group.
So if you want the guy caught, there's really no substitute for good video surveillance. Sure, plenty of cases were based on things like the thief pawning stolen goods, but video was the most prevalent and easiest to work with.
Re:Why not deterrence? (Score:3, Interesting)
When my car was broken into, the thief had greasy fingers and left large as life well made finger prints on the window. I couldn't even pay the police to take them as evidence. I'm not kidding. Property theft is hardly high on the list when they have terrorists and war protester to chase after.
I was thinking of a motion activated camera (low lux black and white) with software control on the pan/tilt and all remoted to the computer room I have. The latest addition on that is to mount a laser pointer on the camera so that it will point at whatever the camera is following.
This could be either lots of fun with the dog, or quite menacing to a would be robber
Re:Here is a start... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agreed with the rest of your post, but from what I've seen of small CCTV cameras these days, they use IR LEDs for illumination. I have one from DealExtreme ($12) that comes with them built in.
-b
Re:Why not deterrence? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's for one thing and one thing only -- insurance. It's really easy to make a claim when you have video footage of someone stealing your stuff. That's it. It doesn't need to be a good quality picture at all. It needs to show a humanoid holding a television.
There are, of course, gravy tastes. Most insurance companies will give you a small discount for having such video. Also, when the cat got out (movers left the basement doors open after they'd left), watching eight hours of video at 16x speed allowed me to figure out that Snickers had crawled into a furnace vent. She came out when we turned off the flow of fresh air.
Re:Where do you live? (Score:2, Interesting)
Good Luck! (Score:5, Interesting)
Did it help anything? No...
The cameras were also in plain sight, and he was especially brazen in how he went about it all.
Technology won't solve the problem.
Do it cheaply (Score:3, Interesting)
Use Motion for indoor webcam surveillance (Score:1, Interesting)
Prevention is better than prosecution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately sirens and strobes on the outside get ignored by the general public, and the cops dont care about the petty crime as much as you would like. When the internal sirens are so loud you nearly vomit, the crooks will leave prematurely and unsuccessful.
Re:IQeye (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentally, timholman, I recommend you invest in a quality still-picture digital camera if you want an economic solution for high quality digital imaging.
I'd take a look at buying one of the cheaper Canon Powershot cameras between $100 and $200 for which there exists open source firmware [slashdot.org]. For networking, you might explore whether or not the USB mechanism in the camera can be coerced into the host role (as opposed to acting as a device) which has been accomplished in similar situations for devices such as the BlackDog [projectblackdog.com] and many iPods with Linux installed [ipodlinux.org]. With USB device hosting capability in hand, you could then easily connect it to a USB Ethernet NIC for a little over $20.
With your own firmware installed, you might even do something really novel and program the camera to do something that will get the intruder's attention before snapping a photo so that they are sure to be looking right at it, giving you an excellent shot of his or her identity.
Let us know how it goes!
How about a fake dog (Score:5, Interesting)
My $500 video system caught 3 thieves in 4 years (Score:4, Interesting)
One cheap color video camera, aimed out the window on my front door. The camera cost $40 on eBay and is wired directly to my DVR. It sees my front stairs, the sidewalk, and street in front of my house.
One modestly cheap color video camera with IR Leds (about $60 on eBay). Hardwired to the DVR. This is on the driveway of my house, pointing towards the street. Its far coverge is similar to the front door.
Neither video camera has Pan/Tilt/Zoom
A 4 Channel Security Video Recorder - records mpeg4. About $250 on eBay. I only use 2 of the 4 channels. A 100Gbyte IDE disk drive adds another $60 to the total.
Cheap car-headrest style 5 inch LCD/TFT monitor, which is set next to my computer monitor.
Wire & connectors to connect everything (to my surprise, cheap CAT-3 cable works fine, even though it isn't shielded!)
An infrared doorbell which chimes whenever someone walks up the drive. When it sounds, I glance at the monitor to see who's there.
The recorder saves a week's worth of imagery. It's a bit of a pain to scan to what I want to see (the DVR software is horrible).
Over the past three years, this setup has:
- Caught one postal thief! The guy came up on my porch and tried to steal two boxes. I caught him in the act, and he ran away, dropping my two boxes along the way. Thanks to the video, the US Postal Inspectors successfully prosecuted him for mail theft. The guy lived in the suburbs and trolled the city looking for mail to steal.
- Caught a purse-snatcher! The SOB chased after a woman on a cell phone; she fought back and held onto her purse. The guy ran away, but I gave the video to the police, who eventually tracked the guy down.
- Stopped a guy from stealing my neighbor's tire (I glanced at the monitor and saw someone removing a tire
- Saved me innumerable trips to the front door, to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses, salespeople, and other such annoyances.
Re:Step 1) Get used camera 2) download this softwa (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I noticed that the same camera would also pause as long as 10 seconds when triggered manually from the button. I will have to go through the menus and see if there is something I can do to fix that.
Specifically, for USB controlled consumer type cameras, is there one that works well and reliably from gphoto ?
But not phony ones (Score:3, Interesting)
deterrence is the first line of home security (thus big signs saying protected by xyz alarm company etc.)
But not phony ones.
Last year, I saw water running down a driveway into the street, and walked up to the house to check it out. Water was leaking out of the garage. Nobody was home, but they had signs for an alarm company. So I called the alarm company, and after much checking at their end, they insisted that they'd never had a system at that address. Looking around, I found a window sticker for a different alarm company. They didn't know of the house either. There was even one of those cheezy "Protected by Electronic Alarm System" stickers you can buy at Radio Shack.
Finally I called the "Police non-emergency" number and left a message.
Re:The surveillence is the easy bit (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. I sat on a grand jury a couple years ago and heard numerous burglary indictments. Most of the cases the police clearly weren't terribly interested until the perp happened to hit a place with good surveillance, and then they usually knew who it was immediately and the case went very quickly.
The county I'm in does grand juries a little oddly -- they have two standing grand juries for all felony indictments (investigatory grand juries are different). You serve one day a month for a year (one jury meets at the start of the month, the other in the middle), and you hear a couple dozen cases each day. So I saw plenty of burglary cases, and the ones that actually came to us tended to have either video surveillance or an ID from a pawn shop. There were some stupid crook stories too (hint: if you're stealing a car, with boat attached, remember to hook up the trailer lights), but mostly the indictments came from video footage accompanied by a comment from the officer that they thought the perp was responsible for several other area breakins but couldn't prove it.
Re:IQeye (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Axis 207MW (Score:3, Interesting)
I have one of those too. Axis cameras are good for the price. I also use Linksys WVC200s, which are good pan/tilt/zoom cameras for around AU$350. A real cheapie is XNET's NTC101W Wireless IPCamera for around AU$200. The XNETs are low quality, but good for motion detection, which is then used to trigger the Axis.
I mainly use Motion [lavrsen.dk] on the software side, along with a couple of shell scripts. At the moment, it's all custom stuff, and my personal setup runs on a MythTV/Samba fileserving box. I've been looking at putting it all together in a live CD distro if I get time.
Not counting the Linux box, which is doing multiple duty, I put together a pretty good home security package for less than AU$1500, most of which was the Axis (at AU$600).
Re:Seriously, get a dog (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend whose father trains guard/attack dogs. They have a gigantic German Shepherd on the farm that is their "show dog."
Goddamn I hate that dog.
You drive up for a BBQ, everyone's inside, and he doesn't know you because you've only been there twice in 5 years. Damn dog charges, snarling, and backs you back into your car. What do you do? You're invited to someone's house, and they have the equivalent of a killbot outside, that makes his own decisions on who is friend and who is foe.
I am very much pro-gun, but attack dogs scare and piss me off. They run on auto-pilot, unlike firearms. A gun sitting in a corner won't hurt anyone. An attack dog might.
So you get back in your car and start honking. The dad comes out, calls the dog off and goes, "Sorry, did he scare you?"
"When he charged me, snarling, with his back up? When he herded me back into my car? Yeah, that scared me." I actually refuse to go there anymore unless they tell me the dog is going to be in the house when I arrive. They think that's a lot to ask, and it is, but I refuse to be put in a survival situation by my friend's damn dog.
Of course, once I've been given the okay by the dad, the dog is just a big sweet dog. I love dogs and usually make friends with them instantly. An attack/guard dog is different. He's trained to hate everyone until told otherwise.
Don't get a guard dog.
Re:IQeye (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, using a still cam with custom housing and a motion sensor is a pretty good idea. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty, a firearm is your best bet.
how about non-webcams? (Score:3, Interesting)
* - technically it's a binary that runs on top of the existing firmware. so sue me.
Deadly force (Score:3, Interesting)
A similar scheme could use attractive snacks and different poisons; but again, make sure that no innocent person becomes a victim.
It won't stop the burglar immediately, but it will stop him before he can victimize yet again.
Re:IQeye (Score:3, Interesting)
A good security camera can take pictures quietly, unobtrusively, without any extra light and send them somewhere else.
I recently looked at the same problem and this is what I ended up with:
1. I have played with the low-end Axis and IMO the older model used to be useless. It did not have sensitivity under low lighting conditions. Same is the case for most other webcams. Using them unless you have security lighting triggered by a different sensor is pointless.
2. There is not that much difference between CMOS and CCD any more. Many CMOS cameras are as good as CCD.
3. There are plenty of sub-120$ (60£) kits on the market that are waterproof, have 10m+ cabling as standard. A proper capture card is around 30£ per channel. The overall result ends up being way cheaper than going IP for the cameras.
Re:IQeye (Score:2, Interesting)
The Eye-Fi [www.eye.fi] is a novel idea but getting a camera to stay on long enough has been a challenge, most have power save features that only let you select a minute or two. I suppose a way around this would be to wire something to press a button every 30 secs to keep it awake.
Being on a limited budget I purchased a $80 7MP Camera from Walmart and found that it had the option to stay on. Opened it up, soldered wires for power (3VDC) and two for the shutter control. A cheap PIR motion detector with a relay will close the connection and snap a picture. Bought a $15 mini tripod and removed the legs and mounted it to the ceiling. Everytime motion is detected the camera snaps a pic and the Eye-Fi transfers a high resolution jpeg to the PC via Wifi.
For the most part it works really good, other than the camera was too cheap to do wide angle, and had no focus control, so the images are blurry. Cameras that enclose the SD card in a metal chassis will present a challenge for range.
I think enough tinkering with other cameras will do the trick. When I called Eye-Fi tech support they never heard of anyone using their product for security and couldn't recommend a cheap, but good camera that will have the 'stay on' feature.
A way to get the intruders attention (Score:4, Interesting)
They always look at what time it is and you get a full face closeup too.
I used to build these camera in clock things years ago, but now you can get them really cheap from china. The camera doesn't need to be such a high resolution as 'chummy' always comes up real close to see what time it is.
Logitech, Apache and Dynamic DNS solution (Score:2, Interesting)
The camera I use is a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000. Good resolution (up to HD when configured correctly), auto light adjustment, easily available and resonably priced. I then use the Logitech "Motion Detection" gadget (free download from Logitech's site) to take care of the video capture. The gadget is configured to save the videos to a password protected directory within my Apache web server. To finish it all off I use a dynamic DNS service to ensure that I can always access my web server, regardless of my current IP address (my ISP uses DHCP so this is a good solution without needing a static IP).
Disclaimer: I do NOT work for Logitech.
Re:But not phony ones (Score:3, Interesting)
Just a picture of the dog and "I live here" isn't any suggestion your dog is violent, but should have the same effect.
Re:IQeye (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so sure of that. There's about 10 million registered ones, and police estimates that there are about 20 million unregistered, illegal ones (not necessarily owned by people who would use them to commit other crimes, there's enough crazed "collectors" out there).
Re:steel door, bars, dog, cameras, safe, and gun (Score:3, Interesting)
Because of this the US has a tradition of firearm ownership for protection of the "homestead" that is respected and maintained even as larger areas are urbanized and existing urban areas become more violent. Honestly, the police in many areas probably expect you to fend for yourself for those first twenty minutes. They get involved after the fact if at all. In high crime areas, a burglary like this will not receive any significant attention.
Europe and the UK are just not set up this way. They have a history of feudal governments that actively disarmed the population, much higher population densities and a post-war inclination towards pacifism. Different strokes for different folks. A common deterent in the US is a sign on the lawn or door that reads, "Protected by Smith and Wesson", a firearms maker, if you don't know.
Re:IQeye (Score:2, Interesting)