This paper introduces a surveillance system that can be deployed in various environments such as home security or child protection to gain multipurpose usage. This system uses free social network platforms like YouTube to provide live streaming to the end users free of cost. Any user can create live events via this application anywhere on the fly. This system is mainly an Android based application that can harness 3G/HSPA or 4G/LTE cellular networks and create a live streaming event on the user’s personal YouTube channel. This paper proposes an architecture of a real-time video streaming service from an Android mobile device to the YouTube Server. The real-time video can then be viewed from a web browser or the user can share it in other social networks. The project builds on open source and network protocols to implement a surveillance system that successfully streams live video. Another unique feature of this system would be on demand video surveillance. Users just need to place an android smartphone to their home and with just an SMS sent to the resident system, it will start live video streaming of the environment where the smartphone has been deployed. This added feature of Drishti has added another level of efficiency to this surveillance system enabling it to be efficient in unnecessary resource consumptions like battery charge or internet data usage. This on-demand video surveillance system feature has put it a level above other systems available in the application play stores. Experimental evaluations show practical resource consumption and a good quality of the streamed video. The Android device works as a RTSP client and YouTube serves as its server for real time streaming. Furthermore, the system is scalable and can support high definition videos with additional increase in hardware and network resources.

Accepted in IEEE CIT 2016, Fiji, Dec 8-10, 2016.