Abstract
Wireless video surveillance is an important option suitable when it is difficult to have cable Internet and electricity infrastructure, which is the case, for example, for construction yards or vehicles. We present iCam, an open-source Internet-enabled video surveillance project, in which we use mainly discarded camera phones. The mobile application is written mainly in Python on most phone platforms, namely Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and iOS, and also on Raspberry Pi, allowing us to share code between the platforms and cutting down our development costs. We used iCam for almost seven years on several smartphones providing video information with high availability from remote sites at low-cost rates, thanks also to a simple form of Bluetooth tethering we employ. We present considerations on the robustness of the phones for long-term usage and also on their memory, CPU and energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to have approached such long-term smartphone usage for surveillance and mobile cross-platform development in the Python language.