Short paper: Surveillance system with light sensor

Traditional surveillance system is enabled by closed-circuit television(CCTV) monitoring each district in real time. However, this approach should install expensive CCTV to every destination and collected images or videos should go through complex post-processing to get useful and meaningful information. Furthermore nowadays CCTV violates people´s private life, which is crucial problem in modern society. If our goal is secure and robust street, more simple and cheap approaches could be favorable. In this paper, we present a novel surveillance system using light sensor which is commonly available in embedded processors or modern smart-phones. On the contrast to the traditional method, light sensor is cheap module and easy to install and process the information. After processing, we can determine the secure or insecure places with derived information. For practical evaluation, we made micro testbed in our campus. First we collected light information from several locations in different time domains. And then secure or insecure places are determined in each time domain. We defined bright and dark places as secure and insecure places, respectively. The evaluation shows that our approach is unprecedented ultra light-weight approach and cost effective method to improve security in our society.