Remote Video Surveillance

Abstract

We present a video surveillance solution that requires minimal installation and configuration effort. Video feeds are encrypted and accessible to anyone with the appropriate authentication credentials. The presented solution does not require any router nor firewall reconfiguration and the video feed is accessible even if the camera is behind a firewall and in a private network. Normally, port-forwarding needs to be enabled on the firewall, at minimum, to enable internet clients to access a camera located in a private network. Our solution enables a camera to be placed behind firewalls, in private networks, and still be accessible from the internet or other private networks without reconfiguring any of the existing network infrastructure. We achieve this by initiating a connection from the camera to a public proxy server which serves the role of an intermediary between clients/users and the camera. Clients connect to the proxy server. The proxy server then hands off the video feed of the camera to the client. This way, there is never a connection initiation from the internet to the camera. We provide three different methods of accessing the video feeds: via: a mobile app, a conventional browser, and a Linux command-line interface.