I have been contacted by a company with multiple fish farm sites in a number of countries (including one based out of my small town). They are having lots of trouble with fish being stolen from the cages at one of these sites.

What we want to setup is a surveillance system with multiple cameras with good day and night vision capabilities. Some of the cameras would be well over 1000' from the building that will house the recording system. Power to these cameras isn't a problem and the view would be generally line of sight. There are two locations and they are about 3 kilometers away from each other with (at least in Google Earth) decent visibility from one to the other. Two systems could be setup independently from each other if needed. Approximately six cameras would be needed in one area and four to six in the other area.

They would like to have the ability to remotely monitor the sites from anywhere in the world (via internet -- only dial-up is available right now, but they would get a satellite system). They would also like to be alerted to suspicious activity via email when motion is detected. The main trigger size would be either car, truck or a boat.

I want a hard drive based recorder that can hold at least a weeks worth of video (1 fps or even less) and a output to a simple DVD recorder to record the video if needed.

I have very little experience with this stuff and this might even be an opportunity for someone from the Spokane, Washington area to work with me on a solution.

Thanks!
Rene

I would suggest using the program motion.

I was going to suggest the same thing.

Sounds like a fun project. Good luck!

The poacher and his daughter
throw soft shadows on the water in the night.
A thin moon slips behind them
as they pull the net with no betraying light.
And later on the coast road, I meet them
and the old man winks a smile.
And who am I to fast deny the right
to take a fish once in a while?

- Jethro Tull

Ian Anderson should know, having run a number of fish farms of his own...

The cages are made with nets and are floating in a river.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I am on the other side of the continent so local help would be something that would be greatly appreciated. I wouldn't want to "try" to get something rigged together and would rather have some pointers to a proven solution.

I've got to find a couple of surveillance companies in the area to see what they have to say. However I expect the price to be very high for them to come in to do the job.

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

Rene

The motion software is a proven solution -- it's pretty much the defacto motion detection software for Linux. I've used it before to monitor the cat food dish, to find out whether my cat was eating after having been sick. Setting it up was pretty easy, and it does have a webserver built in. If you're going to roll your own solution, the most difficult part is going to be the hardware side of things -- finding the weatherproof cameras, and getting them connected up for motion to read. A quick google turns up this, which, though not a webcam, could hook into a video card.

I would second motion, very good and easily tweakable.

I have used the Geovision system at home for the past few years. It runs on windows and to date hasn't crashed once !!!

It's a good scalable commercial solution that is easy to set up for your exact needs. They also do software that allows you to monitor both sites at the same time from the same remote location, pretty cool!

Just another option to think about.

Cheers

Cris.