Project abstract

The idea of this project is to enable cell phone owners to be alerted to when surveillance cameras are watching them. Once they see they are being watched they will be able to connect to the camera using their phone’s Bluetooth capabilities. Their cell phone will then display a small image of what the surveillance camera is seeing. This will provide comfort to those concerned about privacy.

Project scenario

A parent and child are shopping in a department store. While the mother is looking at coats the child wanders away. When the child’s absence is noticed the parent becomes worried but calmly pulls out her cell phone and finds that the store is equipped with insert witty product name here. Using her phone the parent brings up images from nearby security cameras. After cycling through several cameras’ images she spots the runaway child in the toy section and heads over to find him.

Design strategy

The webcam will capture an image and send it in a certain format over USB. This will be attached to a USB connector board attached to the FPGA proto board. This USB connector board will interpret the USB protocol into a signal the FPGA board can understand. The FPGA will resize the image via an averaging algorithm. The algorithm will work on four pixel blocks of the original image, effectively making the image one quarter of the original size after each iteration. It will work by averaging together the colors of a block of pixels (i.e. averaging all four blue pixel values together to get one blue pixel of the smaller-sized image (representing what was previously four pixels), repeated for the red and green colors as well). The resizing of the image will occur over several iterations of this algorithm. This is more efficient than starting with larger blocks of pixels to average together. The resized image will be sent to the personal server where it will be stored and broadcasted out over Bluetooth. The personal server will be connected to the FPGA proto board by either a serial or USB connection. The cell phone will be running a program that is watching the Bluetooth interface for nearby cameras. The initial design will have the personal server constantly broadcasting the camera’s image. When the phone detects the broadcasted image, it will display an icon to the user signaling a viewable camera is present. The user can then select to view the camera’s image. This will cause the phone to load the image for the user on its color screen. Once in this mode, the phone will continually update and display the image.

Design unknowns

1. What is the output of the webcam? Need to select a webcam that has a known communication protocol. How will we communicate with it using the FPGA?

2. The hardware to connect USB to the FPGA. Is there something already on the market which we can some how use? We have found several add-on USB boards for other FPGA proto boards that we might be able to get to work.

3. What kind of cell phone?

4. Developing for the cell phone. Can we use its Bluetooth capabilities easily?

5. How do we use Bluetooth on the personal server?

Implementation plan and schedule

Week of April 19:

1. Figure out USB webcam protocol. Acquire webcam with understandable protocol. (Chris)

2. Determine design plan for USB to FPGA board. (Nate)

a. Contact Xilinx support.

b. Contact 3^rd party proto board makers that have USB solutions

c. Based on research order parts

Week of April 26

1. Get USB to FPGA board working and communicating from camera to FPGA (Both)

2. While waiting for parts begin cell phone development (whoever is not busy)

Week of May 3

1. Program FPGA (both)

2. Ideally by end of this week be able to go from Camera to the FPGA output

Week of May 10

1. Program Personal Server (Nate)

2. Program cell phone (Chris)

3. Product brochure draft (both)

Week of May 17

1. Finish loose ends (both)

2. Testing etc…(both)

3. Draft of paper (both)

Week of May 24

1. Finalize Paper (both)

2. Complete product documentation (both)

We both like team programming, so in most cases we will be working pretty closely together.

Resource requirements

1. USB web camera

2. Hardware to connect USB to FPGA proto board

3. FPGA proto board with mounted FPGA

4. ActiveHDL package to program FPGA

5. Personal server with Bluetooth

6. Cell phone with Bluetooth

7. Cell phone programming environment