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A mouse in the house : Webcam motion detection



We have a mouse in the house. I wanted to have the little intruder on camera. I dug out the old webcam and started to google for webcam motion detection software. Unfortunately a free but closed source program (Yawcam) won over a open source one (Dorgem). You can see the results in the video above.

The mouse makes its appearances at 3:00am, 3:50am and 5:26am. I forgot to add in time stamps to the images, but Yawcam can do that.

Dorgem was not satisfactory because I couldn't get motion detection to work. There was no way to adjust the threshold. I set it to take shots every 1s and it saved images with time stamped filenames (and a time stamp on the image itself) but the motion detection did not work. Perhaps the CCD noise kept triggering the software, I just got image dumps regularly at the 1s rate. [Help page on how to use Dorgem for motion detection]

Yawcam is more professionally designed. It has a motion detection preview pane where you can adjust thresholds or have the software adjust it automatically. The software highlights in real-time parts of the image where it detects motion. I found the auto-set tolerance level (20%) to be a bit high, perhaps because my motion trigger - a mouse - occupied a small part of the frame. I set the tolerance to 5% and the threshold to 95%.

Yawcam logs each motion event with several useful parameters. It has a "motion %". The first mouse appearance is triggered by a value of 5%. In contrast me walking across the kitchen is at 48%. My guess is that the % is the percentage of the screen that goes above motion detection threshold.

Once again:









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Comments

  1. Erika ScipioneApril 15, 2014 at 6:05 PM

    I would love to know more about how you did this, Do you think that there is any way I could rig a wireless wifi cam to do the same thing?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kaushik GhoseApril 15, 2014 at 6:09 PM

    Hi, yes it should be possible same as with a wired cam.

    You could check if the software the webcam came with motion detection in which case it should be very straight forward. If not, do a web search for "webcam motion detection" which should let you do it. I see that dorgem has shut down.

    Best

    ReplyDelete

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