Home Security System Using Kinect, Azure, Windows Phone and Windows 8

Today's project I think it's only missing a kitchen sink. And while there's no download, there is a good bit of information provided to help you get started and build something similar...

Home Security System Using Kinect, Azure, Windows Phone and Windows 8

Most the people who were in the TechEd 2012 India would have witnessed the cool demo by me and Jebarson made on the opening Keynotes of the event. And now we would like to share how this solution was developed so that you can also build your own.

Background

Before we could pitch in, let me give a little background on how we decided to build this on our garage. Developer Conference 2011 on Hyderabad was scheduled on October 2011 and myself and Jebarson were looking forward to show something cool on our own interested areas. Jebarson was looking out for something on Windows Azure and Windows Phone while myself was fiddling around Kinect. Ran out of ideas we both met together and thought of integrating everything and that is when we came up with the idea of building our own home security. We started building this application as early as September 2011. And by now, we have already revised the application more than 5 times due to newer SDK release and also due to the addition of newer components.

Overview

So how does the solution work. You should place Kinect devices on the locations you want to secure and keep it connected to a high end PC capable enough to do a video encoding and up streaming. The Kinect devices will be run by a WPF application running on the PC which will look for any human intrusion. While there is no human intrusion, it will remain in “Patrol Mode” where it will upload pictures of its view on regular intervals to Windows Azure. These pictures can be monitored at any point of time through the application running on Windows Phone and Windows 8. Whenever there is an human intrusion detected the Kinect changes itself to “Intrusion Mode”; it then alerts Windows Azure and also starts streaming the video to the Smooth Streaming Server hosted on Windows Azure. The Azure notifies all the devices subscribed (Windows Phone / Windows 8 ) using a toast and will allow those application to view the live streaming. From your Windows Phone / Windows 8 app you can also control the Kinect device.

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Kinect for Windows

Kinect works as Watch Dog at your home which is connected with Windows Azure. The application was built on Kinect for windows SDK ( V 1.0) . We have used the Skeleton detection features to detect the human body motion. As we have already mentioned by default Kinect will be in “Patrol mode” , where it will upload the image with every 10 sec of interval and if there is any skeleton detection by Kinect sensor, it will start the streaming. We have used the expression encoder SDK to do the stream from application. Below are the list of components which we have used in WPF Client application.

Project Information URL: http://abhijitjana.net/2012/04/16/home-security-system-using-kinect-azure-windows-phone-and-windows-8/

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://abhijitjana.net/
• Twitter: @abhijitjana