Our dorm’s kitchen is nominally disgusting. This is to be expected when 30 students are forced to use the same kitchen.
George Bush once encouraged us all to be vigilant. I don’t think he was asking me to set up a system of cameras in our kitchen to find dirty-dish perpetrators, but I did it anyways. We must, of course, be vigilant.
Spice-rack is a Flask application that’s designed to keep watch over our sinks. It lives on a small server balanced on top of a fridge. Noodly camera appendages branch out from it.
Every ten seconds, a background thread takes a series of snapshots. Motion is tracked from snapshot to snapshot using OpenCV.
Dirty dishes appear when people appear, and people tend to move around. A C3.js graph that shows kitchen movement over time lets our hall’s residents sweep through the kitchen’s history and track down perpetrators.
Evidence can then be collected and spammed at the perpetrators.
There is, of course, a leaderboard.
I don’t think anyone needs to point out the ethical dilemmas associated with wiring a public space with cameras. Hence, the OpenID authorization system and various other protection mechanisms.
Our kitchen now looks more presentable than ever. Thank you, NSA. I’m sure you’re watching anyways.