Watchbot: artificial intelligence on video streams

• Uses Movidius Neural Compute Stick plugged into a Raspberry Pi
• If matching a label (e.g. person, dog, car), post the alert image to a Telegram channel

Other features:

• Schedule on/off times
• Telegram bot provides a control and configuration interface
• Flexible control using Google PubSub messages to turn on & off
• Video scene region of interest masking and cropping
• Healthchecks, heartbeats, alerts when system is down
• Auto recovery when camera connection is lost
• Send system errors to Telegram from the main systemd journal
• Automated restart if frame rate drops
• Telegram rate limiting to prevent flooding

Dependencies

• Intel Movidius NCS (original version)
• OpenCV
• GoCV
• gstreamer

Developing

Watchbot needs the Movidius SDK, so it's necessary to develop on Linux. For this I have an Ubuntu VM, 16.04, with a clone of this repo, and go + deps installed there.

Basic setup steps:

• Install Go
• Install the Movidius SDK. Requires SDK version 1, as the Go bindings are not updated yet in 2.
• make install on SSD mobilenet from the appzoo
• make install on GoCV