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Vitamin D turns your webcam into a security system

A working home surveillance system with motion detection can be easily setup with a cheap webcam and free software such as UGOlog, which we wrote about a while ago. But the problem with such tools, as John Biggs from CrunchGear observed, is that it captures too many blank shots triggered by false alerts like moving leaves or a reflection. Vitamin D Video solves this problem.

Vitamin D Video detects people and moving objects in video streams only inside the regions you define. The user can set “rules” that defines a specific type of event to find in recorded video, or to take action (record or notify) if events like it are seen in the future. For instance, you select a region around a door on a room and set it to record video only when someone walks through it. The system will ignore any movement around the room, but the moment somebody approaches the door or comes directly in front of the marked region, the webcam begins to record.

Vitamin D can determine if an object is:

  • Inside or outside a region
  • Entering or exiting a region
  • On top of a region
  • Entering or exiting through a door
  • Crossing a boundary
  • Loitering

vitamind-door 

Vitamin D can record videos, play a sound and even notify you by emails with screenshots of the intruder.

Vitamin D supports multiple cameras including network webcams. It works on Windows XP, Vista and 7, as well as on Mac OSX.

The software is in beta and currently available for free. A subscription version will be sold in early 2010.

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