Drishti: A Mobile Application Based Multipurpose Surveillance System

This paper introduces a surveillance system that can be deployed in various environments such as home security or child protection. It takes the advantage of video sharing platforms like YouTube to provide live streaming to the end users free of cost. Any user can create live events via this application anywhere on the fly. This system is mainly an Android based application that can harness 3G/HSPA or 4G/LTE cellular networks and create a live streaming event on the user's personal YouTube channel. The real-time video can then be viewed from a web browser or the user can share it in other social networks. This solution, named as Drishti, builds on open source and network protocols to implement a surveillance system that successfully streams live video. Another unique feature of this system is the on-demand video surveillance, where users just need to place a smartphone in their home. With just an SMS sent to the remote smartphone, it will start live video streaming of the environment where the smartphone has been deployed. This feature enables Drishti to be efficient in unnecessary resource consumption like battery charge or Internet data usage. This on-demand video surveillance system feature has put it a level above other systems available in the online app stores. Experimental evaluations show practical resource consumption and a good quality of the streamed video. Here Android devices work as a RTSP client and YouTube remains as its server for real time streaming. The solution is scalable and can support high definition videos with additional hardware and network resources.