Vera is a home surveillance system that upcycles old smartphones as surveillance cameras. This project was created during Hack The North 2017, and it won the Pagerduty API challenge.

Once every few seconds, the app takes a picture on the surveillance phone. It is compared to the previous picture using a change detection algorithm (we also compress the images to speed up processing time). If the change between the pictures is significant, then the (uncompressed) image is sent through the Microsoft Computer Vision API, which detects which categories the image falls under. If the "person" category is a likely category for the photo, then a signal is sent through the Pagerduty API and our personal backend server to send a notification to the user's primary device that a security breach has been detected.

The back-end was created using Node.js and Postgres. We used OpenSSL to set up a well-encapsulated security system, and JSON web tokens (JWTs) to enforce secure connections with APIs. We also incorporated web sockets to allow for real-time interactions between our server and the personal/surveillance devices. The mobile front-end was built entirely in Android Studio, and the web front-end uses Angular 4. We used the Pagerduty API to manage incident notifications, as well as the Microsoft Cognitive Services API for image recognition.

For more info, see our Devpost project submission.