Home Aquarium Monitor
I have a bunch of web cams around so decided to try something “useful” with them, while shamelessly playing around with some visual processing techniques in the process. I’ve been trying to build a monitoring system for my home aquarium. It’s doing pretty decently for a first take.
This is a four web cam set up around a 1.5 gallon aquarium. Two cameras are on the top of the aquarium and two are mounted on the side. The four rows on the screen show the output of the different cameras as well as some visually processed results. The screen shots from left to right are:
(1) The raw output of the webcam.
(2) Basic motion detection in the scene. Pretty much does a diff between the current image and last two images.
(3) Edge Detection – looks for differences in color in neighboring pixels.
Alas, some of the cameras are doing a lot better than others at isolating the fish. Watch camera 2 and the motion detection screen for it and you can see its doing a pretty decent job of isolating the fish in the scene.
I hope to eventually not only improve the the fish motion tracking (perhaps using more temporal and the edge data) but get the cameras to collaborate to figure out where each of the fish are likely to be in the tank for each time step.
Dr. Prateek Tandon 