Mobile-cybernetic-cloud integrated surveillance and alert system

Abstract

Security has been an essential part of human lives in a present era where the canker of crime has no intention of bowing out of society. Thus, being motivated to avail a relatively reliable and affordable form of security to society, this research sought to develop an integrated mobile- cybernetic-cloud based surveillance or object detection and monitoring system to monitor homes, warehouses, office spaces, outdoor areas and other areas which may require surveillance. The research described in this paper employed an integrated web, mobile, cloud and image detection to make security surveillance robust, portable and real-time with respect to alerts. A webbased surveillance system was designed which is deemed suitable for the African region, Ghana to be more precise, due to its ability to operate under the slowest of internet connectivity and with the  continuous sunny weather conditions enjoyed in the region. The systems use image transformations and analysis namely image resizing, Color conversion, Image blurring, image thresholding and image dilation to achieve object detection. A Raspberry Pi 2 miniaturized computer, a camera module, a Wi-Fi dongle, GSM mobile communication module and a power bank with 7000mAh capacity were mounted to capture frames from a streaming video, carry out object detection on the captured images. The captured images are dispatched via email, short message service (SMS) alerts with an interface to a cloud system with the computing device to store images. Future work on this research will consider the following: integration of a night vision camera to perform human detection in the dark. Moreover, a mobile application could be built across the various mobile platforms to serve as extra channels for receiving alerts. Further on a Python script could be modified to further perform a face match and detection to narrow false positives.

Keywords: mobile communication, cybernetics, cloud, system, object, detection, monitoring.