We had some cameras installed at our house last year, partly for security, but mainly so we could know who is at the door before answering it in our PJs. Unfortunately, the software that comes with the camera DVR is pretty clunky, so it takes way too long to bring up the feed when the doorbell rings and I often don’t bother.
Luckily, the DVR exposes RTSP streams that you can capture and playback with your favorite mpeg player. And I just learned how to build a pretty good image classifier that needed a practical application.
Thus, I built an app to tell whether someone is at the door, before they ring the bell. I labeled some 4000 historical images as person or non-person, trained a CNN, and made a quick python app to run inference on the live feed. When a person is in range of the door camera, it aims the lasers tells you so.
Not bad for having two whole weeks of deep learning under my belt. The interface could stand to be much better, of course. A little web page that sends a browser notification and link to the image or live feed would be the obvious next step. Perhaps the lasers are after that.
I know this is something that comes out of the box with commercial offerings such as Ring, but at least my images aren’t being streamed to the local police.