REMOTE CONTROL FACILITIES OF WEB-BASED

SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM FOR ELECTRIC POWER APPLIANCE

AND NETWORK CAMERA

Yoshiro IMAI

∗

, Yuichi Sugiue, Akira Andatsu

Faculty of Engineering, * also a member of Information Technology Center, Kagawa University

2217-20 Hayashi-cho Takamatsu, 761-0396 Japan

Daisuke Yamane, Hirofumi Kuwajima, Shin’ich Masuda

CMICRO Corporation

269-1,Hayashi-chou,Takamatsu-city,Kagawa,761-0301,JAPAN

Keywords:

Remote monitoring and controlling, cellular phone, image database, camera platform homing.

Abstract:

We have been improving our monitoring system, which had been organized with network cameras, an inte-

grated web/mail server, web-based clients and remote control devices. Several kinds of devices can be used

as our clients including, for example, high-performance cellular phone, which are equipped with Java virtual

machine and web-browsing facilities.

Our integrated server is designed to play intensive roles of web and e-mail services. It can obtain JPEG images

from network cameras, process them, accumulate them into its database. It can also receive some types of

requests from clients, analyze them and perform registered services for monitoring and/or controlling. Almost

all software of our monitoring system have been written in Java programming language, because of easy and

powerful description of GUI as well as network programming.

1 INTRODUCTION

People need higher performance monitoring system

with lower cost. Security cameras and sensors are

widely employed in the several area and public en-

vironment. So we want to utilize them and obtain

an useful information including images for our de-

termination as well as our risk aversion. We have

developed a monitoring system in order to perform

remote monitoring and remote controlling services

for system reliability and maintenance. The previous

version of our monitoring system was realized with

well-known technologies, such as server-client com-

puting model, security camera with network facility,

Java technology for several computing environment,

HTTP(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)-based network

programming style and Linux-based computing envi-

ronment with several kinds of open-source software.

2 SYSTEM CONFIGURATION

2.1 Monitoring Facilities

An integrated server of our monitoring system can pe-

riodically obtain images from some network cameras

through the private network. Such images are trans-

mitted from camera to server by means of HTTP-

based communication procedure. They are accumu-

lated as JPEG images temporally into the internal

buffer of the server, reduced into a fourth and a ninth

resized image data and ﬁnally stored into image data-

base. Reduction of image must be done, because

some mobile devices allow only restricted amount of

packet size between the server and themselves.

In order to realize remote monitoring, it is ab-

solutely necessary to obtain several kinds of images.

Although animated (moving) pictures would be much

more effective to make a suitable decision about the

target situation than stationary ones, our system can

only deal with continuously stationary pictures still

now. Integrated Server requires network camera to

transmit JPEG images at a sampling rate, receives

such images as monitoring view, reduces size of im-

ages and then accumulates a series of them in the

storage. The server also prepares Java Applet on its

homepage through its Web service, begins to run the

process of http daemon (Apache), waits for clients’

access from global network and then delivers such an

Applet to the target client. Figure 1 shows a scheme

of our remote monitoring procedure.

At the side of client, Java Applet downloaded from

the server provides a GUI which communicate server

311

IMAI Y., Sugiue Y., Andatsu A., Yamane D., Kuwajima H. and Masuda S. (2005).

REMOTE CONTROL FACILITIES OF WEB-BASED SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM FOR ELECTRIC POWER APPLIANCE AND NETWORK CAMERA.

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, pages 311-314

 SciTePress

Figure 1: Schema of Obtaining Image from Network Cam-

era and Processing it for the several types of Client of Mon-

itoring System

to requests transmitting JPEG image by means of

HTTP connection and display received JPEG data ﬁle

on the browser in the mode of stationary image or

continuously alternating images like as slide show.

In the case of later mode, Applet prefetches JPEG

data from server, stores and preload in the double-

buffering style, and realize quasi-moving picture on

the display of PC’s browser.

2.2 Control Facilities

Remote control service seems to be essential for sup-

plementing remote monitoring service and enlarging

it into wide application. Various control mechanisms

have been proposed for several application. This time,

we have employed power switching facility as remote

control function. It is based on the OpenPLANET

technology, which has been developed by the Shikoku

Electric Power Company Ltd. It has some excellent

characteristics, one of which is to transmit digital in-

formation from node to node through electric power

line.

OpenPLANET control server is connected to In-

tegrated Server in the private network. It works as

sub-server in our monitoring system. It has a ded-

icated interface to connect serially with the Electric

Power Line Router (EPLR). It is the special-purpose

microcomputer-based device, which can translate dig-

ital information into analog signal and mix it along

electric power line. With EPLR, digital information

of OpenPLANET server can be carried to another

computer only by means of electric power line within

single electric power distribution board. So we need

not to equip additional cable to transmit digital infor-

mation between controller and the target node to be

controlled.

Power Control Adaptor (PCA) is the special-

purpose power outlet based on OpenPLANET tech-

nology, which can turn on or off electric power ac-

cording to analog control signal from remote con-

troller via electric power line. The Open PLANET

server provides remote control facilities to perform

electric power switching by means of transmitting

control signal for digital information into PCA with

EPLR.

Our Integrated Server has a connection with such

an OpenPLANET server, sends and receives socket-

based messages to/from such a server, and performs

remote control service for electric power switching

through private networking. Communication between

our server and OpenPLANET server is carried out

based on TCP/IP protocol and software for their com-

munication is realized with Java programming. Java

codes can be executed not only on our Integrated

Server but also on the OpenPLANET server. And

frankly speaking almost software of our server is writ-

ten with Java programming language.

The merits of employing the OpenPLANET tech-

nology are summarized as follows:

• No additional cabling is necessary to realize re-

mote power switching, because control signal can

be transmitted via electric power line with EPLR.

• No additional remodeling of target device to be

controlled is necessary, because PCA is equipped

between such a target device and according con-

ventional power outlet.

Figure 2: Schema of Controlling Appiance with Open-

PLANET in our Monitoring System

Client users can enjoy remote control service from

Integrated Server if they request Java applet down-

load from the server to do power switching. Such

a Java applet communicates with its Server to al-

low OpenPLANET control sub-server to perform the

above control mechanism. Figure 2 shows a scheme

of our remote control procedure.

2.3 GUI Services for Cellular Phone

Figure 3 shows a sample view of monitoring image on

a cellular phone, which is delivered from Integrated

Server. It is a view of a display image from CLDC-

based Java application emulator for a certain cellular

phone. In order to reduce useless trafﬁc cost between

cellular phone and Integrated Server, client of cellular

phone must make sure to push the bottom for obtain-

ing the next image from Integrated Server.

Figure 3: Schema of communication between server and

CDLC-based Cellular Phone for Obtaining Image from

Network camera

With Java applet, clients can browse monitoring

quasi-moving image obtained from network camera

on their browser of PC through Integrated Server. But

it has seemed to be more effective and convenient

for clients to browse such images with their cellular

phones, because almost all people of Japan always

carry their cellular phones together with them. One of

various Java technologies, for example CLDC (Con-

nected Limited Device Conﬁguration) of Java 2 Micro

Edition(YuFeng and Zhu, 2001), allows us to utilize

relatively small sizes of Java program (or Java appli-

cation) on the speciﬁc cellular phones, and then it can

be downloaded from a certain Web server and perform

a mobile communication based on HTTP connection

between server and cellular phones.

Integrated Server has prepared such a Java applet

on its homepage, deliver it into clients’ cellular phone

according their requests, and communicate it in or-

der to transmit monitoring images and allow cellular

phones to browse them. As there are some constraints

on the image data size, which cellular phones can ac-

cept at the one time, for both of transmission and dis-

play of it, then our Server must reduce JPEG images

from network camera into a suitable size for cellular

phones and accumulate these images in its storage for

request of image delivery from cellular phones.

3 SYSTEM EVALUATION

3.1 Image Processing and E-mail

service

Users whose e-mail addresses have been entered in

our Integrated Server can receive e-mails about some

kinds of message from the server, when monitoring

system recognizes whether a situation of target sys-

tem needs sending message, such as emergency con-

tact or not. Our message mailing service covers the

following two cases, namely,

• Normal e-mail transmission service, which in-

cludes sending message to such personal comput-

ers connected to wired / wireless LAN.

• Mobile e-mail transmission service, which deals

with cellular phone and/or PHS through global

communication network.

In the former case, generally speaking, e-mail is

one of the most usual message transmission methods

between computer’s users of LAN and the Internet.

And the message to be sent may contain description

of a special URL, which tells users to get informa-

tion about image, control scheme and Java applet.

With such information, clients can access a suitable

resource for them to steer the monitoring system efﬁ-

ciently.

On the other hand, clients sometimes leave their

seats where they sit down and work with computers.

They will carry cellular phones or PHS’s with them,

however, even at such a situation. In the later case,

cellular phone including PHS provides wide area of

e-mail service to clients, so that message from server

can be delivered to the target clients no matter where

they are.

It is very much useful for emergency message to

be sent to clients when monitoring system and clients

decide to utilize e-mail service of cellular phone and

PHS. With such message mailing service, some emer-

gency call can be realized as follows; Integrated

Server periodically obtains a series of images from

network cameras. When a new image is partially dif-

ferent from the previous one, image recognition pro-

cedure, which has been already invoked, investigates

whether the target two images have a certain differ-

ence on a fourth or a ninth of whole image or not.

If such a procedure proves some difference be-

tween two images, Integrated Server recognizes that

some change of images happens at the monitoring

point, decides to send the suitable clients e-mail by

means of the above message mailing service. Inte-

grated Server has been customized to be a mail server.

When image recognition procedure points out the dif-

ference between target images, Integrated Server has

sent e-mail to the previously entered clients with e-

mail sending facilities. Especially, sending e-mail to

cellular phone client is effectively because users al-

most always carry around such cellular phones.

3.2 Image Processing with Database

for Camera Homing

Some cameras have special platforms to be controlled

by external signal, so that they can perform smooth

homing to seize and hold the dynamic changes of

target view. Some direction information for control-

ling such a platform can be calculated effectively with

image database and image processing. Image data-

base has been realized with freeware database en-

gine named PostgreSQL and its image data can be

obtained from network camera periodically. Image

processing has been done with the following proce-

dures; two target images extracted from database are

divided into fourth or ninth pieces of sub image, cor-

responding two pieces of sub image are compared

with pixel-wise operations, and detection of dynamic

changes can be performed based on the result whether

compared two sub images are different or not. Fig-

ure4 shows a scheme of image processing with data-

base for camera homing.

Figure 4: Schema of Image Processing with Database for

Camera Homing

According to the detection and position of dynamic

changes, direction of controlling camera platform can

be computed in order to realize automatic homing.

And then the event concerned with start of automatic

homing can be informed into the speciﬁc client as

emergency contact by means of e-mail services as de-

scribed in the previous subsesction. The information

of such a situation for clients are sent with a warning

message including the URL expression which con-

tains Java Applets for PC browser and/or a special

CLDC-based Java applications for some kinds of cel-

lular phone.

The clients which have received the above infor-

mation can download the suitable Java Applets or

CLDC-base Java applications through wide area net-

work so that they can enjoy personalized (or privacy-

based) remote monitoring by means of the location-

independent way. Enhancement of our monitoring

system can be realized and supported with the above

structure and method.

4 CONCLUSION

We have described design and tentative implemen-

tation of a distributed monitoring prototype system.

This prototype has been available to obtain image

from network camera, perform power switching for

electrical device and appliance and so that it can en-

sure reliable use of electric and/or mechanical sys-

tems. Our monitoring system contains several kinds

of servers: Integrated Server is designed to play an

intensive role to instruct and integrate its subsystems

by means of network connectivity.

In our work, Web service mechanism and Java

technology are essential keys to al-low our system to

be much useful to describe several server programs

and smart GUI’s, and network-oriented applications

efﬁciently. Instead of Integrated Server, many sub-

systems are organized, for example, network camera,

remote sensors, remote switches and remote control

devices. They can cooperatively work together to re-

alize distributed monitoring system. Mobile comput-

ing devices, especially, wireless portable PC’s and/or

cellular are useful for client users to communicate

with monitoring and database server at any place as

well as at any time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors would like to express the special thanks

to Mr. Daisuke Yamane of Cmicro Inc. and Mr. Os-

amu Sadayuki of Sharp Business Computer Inc. for

their several contributions of developing the previous

version of our monitoring system. They are also very

thankful to Mr. Kazumasa Miyazaki of NTT Do-

CoMo Shikoku and Mr. Ryoichi Ozaki of Vodafone

Japan for their constructive advices to develop soft-

ware for cellular phones, as the clients of our moni-

toring system.

REFERENCES

YuFeng and Zhu, J. (2001). Wireless Java Programming

with J2ME. In Pearson Education.