Wireless Security Camera

- A report

Special Assignment for - Wireless Sensor Networks

Institute Of Technology, Nirma University

Mentors :

Prof. Ami Shukla

Prof. Sachin Gajjar

By –

12BIC044 [Aasheesh Tandon]

12BIC056 [Paxaj Shukla]

20th April, 2015

I. Introduction

Surveillance is becoming a need in any public or private area to cope up with increasing number of threats starting from burglary, robbery to terrorist activities. The traditional methods for monitoring are commonly confined in the use of CCTV cameras or wireless sensor network (WSN). These two techniques serve the purpose in different ways. CCTV cameras help in visual monitoring of target area whereas WSN helps in acquiring physical information from the environment, like change in thermal, chemical, magnetic conditions. These sensors can not only sense the environment, they also can measure, gather information from environment and based on some condition can transmit sensed data to end user. This characteristic of sensor nodes make these small size restricted resources into a small weapon with great potential for many applications in scenarios such as target tracking and surveillance. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can assist in intrusion detection, identification and object tracking. Because of the potential to facilitate data acquisition and data processing a smart communication system could be built up using these sensor nodes and cameras. Taking advantage of their working methodology the smart network with sensor motes and cameras can potentially advance the pursuit of object tracking in an indoor/outdoor area. This report is about a wireless camera, which is made for surveillance application. The video streamed by the wireless camera can be accessed by any device, such as a computer or smartphone which is connected to the same ad-hoc network as the wireless camera. Data Security for this video streaming can be implemented at two steps – a.) Establishing a connection with the ad-hoc network requires a password; b.) Accessing the web-interface for streaming the video can also be password protection, protecting the data from unauthorized users.

II. Setup

The following components are required to setup a wireless camera :

• a Raspberry PI • a micro USB power supply (5V, 1A) • an SD memory card (at least 8GB) • an USB webcam • an USB WiFi adapter (optionally, if an Ethernet connection is not available)

• a Router (to create ad-hoc network) • a computer or smartphone (acting as a base station)

a.) Setting up the Raspberry Pi : An 8GB SD which is loaded with Raspbian OS is used in the R-pi. The device needs at least 5V, which can be provided using a micro USB power supply. SSH protocol is used to remotely program the R-pi from a pc. The software used for this purpose is ‘MobaXterm’. Internet connection can be provided to R-pi through the Ethernet cable or using WiFi adapter. The software used for video streaming is ‘mjpg streamer’, which has to be downloaded on the R-pi, using commands in the LXE terminal. Next, the web-camera is connected via USB port and it is enabled using raspi-config.

b.) Setting up an ad-hoc network : A standard router is used to create an ad-hoc network, to which we can connect the raspberry pi and the computer (or smartphone). For this, a WiFi adaptor (dongle) can used or an Ethernet cable can be used to connect R-pi with the router. The computer (or smartphone) can be connected to the router using WiFi (IEEE 802.11).

c.) Setting up the base station : A computer or a smartphone connected to the same ad-hoc network

as the node (R-pi + web-camera), can act as a base station/end receiver. To view the live streaming video as captured by the web-camera, ‘192.168.x.x:port_number’ has to be entered in the url box of a browser. This will open the ‘mjpg streamer’ web interface, and clicking on ‘stream’, will allow us to get live video of the area under surveillance.

III. Working

With Raspberry Pi and a web-camera connected via USB you can do video streaming in just a few simple steps. This solution is based on the mjpg-streamer server application. This solution is very simple as it uses existing streaming technologies. Everything happens over HTTP, a standard protocol found everywhere and very accessible today. Practically, a mini-webserver that runs on Raspberry Pi, serves video as a M-JPG file. M-JPG is actually a set of JPG images as frames of a movie. M-JPG's advantage is that it requires no plugins or browser extension to play. A simple HTML IMG tag, with right dimensions and source attribute set to point to the served M-JPG would be enough to show the video in a standard web page. Using the M-JPG format you can embedded live video in any web page with just a simple img tag :

<img src="http://raspberrypi:8080/?action=stream" />

Ethernet protocol (IEEE 802.3) is used to connect the R-pi to the router. Smartphone/computer uses WiFi protocol (IEEE 802.11) to connect to the ad-hoc network created by the router. Hence a user can view the video streamed by the web-camera in a browser.

IV. Potential Advantages

Flexibility: IP cameras can be moved around anywhere on a network (wireless). Encryption & authentication: IP cameras offer secure data transmission through encryption and

authentication methods such as WPA, WPA2, TKIP, AES. Remote accessibility : live video from selected cameras can be viewed from anywhere. IP camera communication signals are not just electronic voltage, it is numerically decoded as bits and

bytes with security features and TCP/IP protocol.

V. Potential Disadvantages High network bandwidth requirements. As with a CCTV/DVR system, if the video is transmitted over the public Internet rather than a private

IP LAN, the system becomes open to a wider audience of hackers and hoaxers. Public internet connection video is rather complicated to set up and requires a dynamic DNS.

VI. Conclusion

Several more ‘R-PIs + web-cameras’ can be connected to get a larger field covered under video surveillance. This provides a cost effective approach, as the web-cameras used are inexpensive. Moreover, the signal from one camera can be picked up by any receiver; we can have multiple receivers in various locations. Albeit it should be kept in mind that this setup is susceptible to interference from other household devices, such as microwaves, cordless phones, video game controllers, and routers.