I have a lot of cameras. One at the front door, a pan-tilt-zoom camera inside, another in the garage, and a dash camera looking out both ends of the car. Most of the time I leave them alone.
Then something happens and I want to know what actually happened. Did the package arrive? When did that noise start? What happened right before the bump in the parking lot? Having a recording makes those questions a lot easier to answer.
I think of it as a kind of self-insurance. The camera can't stop someone from hitting the car, but at least I have something to go on afterward. A timestamp is more useful than my recollection of a stressful afternoon.
Great, now I have more files
Cameras are cheap. Storage is cheap. Recording twenty-four hours of video is easy enough. Watching it back? No thanks.
This is where I want local AI to help. Tell me when someone approached the door, when a car stopped near mine, or when something changed in the garage. Give me the few clips I might care about so I can get on with whatever I was doing.
The local part matters. I'd like the footage to stay on hardware I control while the software sorts through it. There is no shortage of data here; finding the relevant minute is the problem.
A few rules
- Put cameras where there's a reason to record, and make them visible.
- Keep the footage local by default, with as little exposed to the internet as possible.
- Delete ordinary footage after a short retention period. Save the occasional clip that matters.
- Leave private spaces private. People sharing the space should know what's being recorded.
- Leave audio off when consent or recording rules are unclear.
- Check the actual footage before trusting a model's description of it.
I can find a camera reassuring while somebody else finds it uncomfortable. That's a conversation to have with the people who live there.
What I'm trying next
I'd like to ask a small local model things like “show me the deliveries this week” or “when did this object move?” and get the relevant footage back. Or have it find the minute before an impact sensor fired, without me hunting through a day's worth of driving.
The cameras already recorded it. Now I want a way to find it. More on this as I work through the setup.