Home Security System - Motion Detector

Home Security System what you can control from a website.

Detects motion with a simple (and cheap) webcamera connected to a Raspberry Pi, and if it detects motion, the pictures are uploaded to a Firebase project storage.

Read more about the project here

Setup

What you will need:

• Raspberry Pi (but you can test it on your laptop/PC, or any other device which can run Python scripts and the hardware is enough for image processing tasks)
• Webcamera (simple and cheap)
• Firebase Project

Setup Firebase Project

We need to setup a Firebase project. This is a simple way to authenticate users and store captured images.

1. Go to https://console.firebase.google.com/
2. Create a new Project (I named it Home Security)
3. Setup Authentication:
   1. Enable Email/Password user authentication
   2. Add users (for yourself, your mom, dad, etc...) - They will be able to start or stop the security system
4. Save apiKey, authDomain, databaseURL, storageBucket, messagingSenderId and fill out config.ini

Install

You can use Anaconda to simplify the steps

• Python 3 (but it works with Python 2 too)
• OpenCV 3 (better) or OpenCV 2
• Pyrebase - pip install pyrebase
• Flask - pip install flask

After these steps, you are ready to run the code!

Test

You just have to run app_home_security.py -> python app_home_security.py.

Now, find out the local ip address of your device which runs the Home Security System (for example 192.168.0.12). With another device like your smartphone, laptop, etc... open your browser and go to 192.168.0.12:5000 to see the welcome page.

Go to 192.168.0.12:5000/login or navigate there from the homepage and you can start the fun with your own Home Security system!

• Enter your email and password
• Enter the minimum detection area (the smaller the value the more it is sensitive for movements, changes on the captured image)
• Choose to start or stop the system

If the System detects movement it will snap a picture and upload to your Firebase project.

Extend Home Security

If you would like to make other things happen when it detects motion than you can edit home_security.py which you can find at:

HomeSecurityModules/
    HomeSecurity/
        home_security.py
        __init__.py

For example you can create a method which not just uploads the image to the Firebase project storage, but it sends you a message, email, notification.

I provided a simple notification class with Slack. This sends you a message after motion is detected. You only have to install the slackclient package and put the necessary code to home_security.py.

Computer Vision

Here you can see the main steps of the motion detector. You can read more about this part at this blog post

Images

About

Gábor Vecsei

• Personal Blog
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Github
• [email protected]