[Scott] has a neat little closet in his carport that acts as a shelter and rest area for their outdoor cat, Rory. She has a bed and food and water, so when she’s outside on an adventure she has a place to eat and drink and nap in case her humans aren’t available to let her back in. However, [Scott] recently noticed that they seemed to be going through a lot of food, and they couldn’t figure out where it was going. Kitty wasn’t growing a potbelly, so something else was eating the food.
So [Scott] rolled up his sleeves and hacked together an OpenCV project with a FLIR Boson to try and catch the thief. To reduce the amount of footage to go through, the system would only capture video when it detected movement or a large change in the scene. It would then take snapshots, timestamp them, and optionally record a feed of the video. [Scott] originally started writing the system in Python, but it couldn’t keep up and was causing frames to be dropped when motion was detected. Eventually, he re-wrote the prototype in C++ which of course resulted in much better performance!
Rory, the star of the show
It didn’t take long to nab the thief — actually, thieves! It seemed quite a few different local animals had discovered Rory’s shelter and were helping themselves to her food. How rude! The first night detected a few different visitors. First, Rory’s local “boyfriend” stopped by to have a snack. Then within half an hour, an opossum (or possibly a small raccoon?) scarfed down what food was left. And within fifteen minutes of that visitor, a rac ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
