Circuit Lake

This low cost motion sensor named is mOtiOn. It is built based on real time processing of a video signal using analog preprocessing and optimized image processing algorithms in an AVR ATmega88 microcontroller.

The system able to detect movement in an incoming composite video signal in real time at 30 frames per second, show where the movement has been detected by highlighting it in its video output and report movement through its serial interface and a digital output pin. It is also able to mask some sections of each captured frame so that detection only is performed on user specified parts and have several parameters to filter noise, adjust motion sensitivity, ignore lighting changes and avoid tampering.

Naubert Aparicio, the project designer, said that this sensor could be used for various applications: surveillance, security monitoring and alerting, photography, industrial checks, robotics, etc. and it is a better sensor than IR sensors in situations where directed or far sensing is required. An interesting point that makes this project different of other AVR video processing circuits is that this sensor process an analog composite video signal and it doesn’t use a video decoder chip, thus reducing significantly its cost. A normal analog video signal is the input, no special digital camera is required.