Low-Cost Smart Surveillance System for Smart Cities

The safety of people and spaces is of paramount importance for societies. With time, the implementation of safety measures is rapidly changing from a need to a priority. Video surveillance systems play a key role in the surveillance of crucial and critical areas as these systems help the authorities keep places safer. With the rapid growth of technology and the implementation of the smart city concept, it is becoming possible to develop and deploy wide area surveillance systems. The ease with which these systems can be installed in private and public spaces (e.g., homes, streets and parks) allow for the creation of ubiquitous monitored environments. Rapid intervention responses to any abnormal situation or the use of recorded video as evidence are some advantages of the use of this type of surveillance systems. Although ubiquitous video surveillance systems are relevant for present modern societies, their cost is still high. To solve or, at least to mitigate this problem, a low-cost smart surveillance system was developed, which is presented and described in this paper. The developed surveillance system, based on available low-cost technology, can help keep critical spaces under surveillance 24/7. The proposed solution was found to have a minimal cost, a low bandwidth, and to be scalable and adaptable to every client’s needs. Thus, the solution can be used by anybody (private and public) and applied in different contexts (e.g., residential, industrial). The system can provide still images, captured from surveillance video cameras, real time video and real time video processing, which can be used for motion detection. When this happens, the user is warned via an e-mail containing the identification of the respective surveillance camera. Only the relevant video events are sent, recorded and maintained in the cloud platform system, consequently reducing the amount of storage space required to maintain all the historical video events. The results of the tests carried out show that it is possible to stream a video from the surveillance cameras with an insignificant delay and that motion detection can be attained through real time video processing. The system presented potentiates a low-cost solution for a smart city in the surveillance field.