Software turns cellphones into surveillance network

Story link: Software turns cellphones into surveillance network by Jan Harris

Software that turns groups of ordinary camera phones into an intelligent surveillance camera network, has been developed by researchers at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Zurich, Switzerland.

Philipp Bolliger, Moritz Köhler and Kay Römer developed the software, called Facet, and plan to release it as an open source project for programmers to experiment with.

To test the software, the researchers attached four Nokia 6630 phones equipped with Facet to the ceiling of a corridor in their department.

The phones were placed so that their cameras could view different parts of the corridor.

When a Facet-enabled phone detects an object entering or leaving its field of view it communicates the information to adjacent phones via Bluetooth. In this way, the message can be passed to the whole network.

The system can collectively analyse data. Each phone determines how far it is away from its nearest neighbour, based on how long it takes a person to walk between phones. The calculation is based on average walking speed.

One handset then passes the message to a computer over a GPRS cellphone connection.

The system has a range of possible applications, such as sounding an alarm when someone approaches a sensitive area.

The Zurich team now plans to improve the system’s ability to analyse images.