Overview

Package of tools for interfacing with PTZ network surveillance cameras and controlling them in responsive and programmatic ways.

Hardware

• a Pan-Tilt-Zoom networked surveillance camera that has good compliance with the ONVIF protocol. ptzipcam has been the most tested with Hikvision cameras.

• a computer to run the software (tested on a few x86_64 systems and on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B devices)

• ethernet cable to connect the camera to the computer

• power source for the camera

Operating System

Currently, ptzipcam has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 on x86_64 machines and Raspian Buster on Pis (ARM CPU)

Installation instructions

From PyPI

pip install ptzipcam

Note you probably still will need to install the WSDL files as outlined below. However, the instructions below do assume you have installed ptzipcam in a virtual environment and that you have some WSDL files to work with (some are included in the package code repo itself)

From GitHub repo

Clone the ptzipcam repository

git clone git@github.com:iingram/ptzipcam.git

Set up a virtual environment

It is recommended to create a virtual environment to work within.

Install the virtualenv packages we need:

sudo pip3 install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Setup virtual environment tools:

echo -e "\n# Virtual environment setup" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Create a virtual environment for the ptzipcam project:

mkvirtualenv ptzipcam_env

Note that ptzipcam requires Python 3 so if the default on your system is Python 2, make sure the virtual environment will use Python 3:

mkvirtualenv ptzipcam_env -p python3

Activate virtual environment (not necessary if you just made it)

workon ptzipcam_env

Run install script

./install.sh

Testing

To verify everything is configured properly you can try one of the example applications. Some of these require more hardware and packages so a good one to test with is this one:

./look_around_randomly.py cfgs/CONFIG_FILE.yaml

You'll notice the example takes a YAML configuration file as its only CLI argument. An example configuration file is provided in cfgs/ Some elements have to be configured for your particular setup (e.g. the IP of the camera and user credentials for an account on the camera (the account must have ONVIF privileges)). For now it is assumed that these are well-enough self-documented in the example config file but when that turns out not to be the case, we'll provide better documentation here, plus some documentation of the other configuration parameters that should work with most cameras without adjustment but that you might want to tune for your application.

Installing WSDL files

For the ONVIF connection to the camera to work, WSDL files must be placed in the appropriate place in the virtual environment files.

If you are installing from the repository, for convenience a set of WSDL files are currently included in the repo so the following steps should put them in the correct location (assuming you are still inside of the local ptzipcam repo directory):

 cp wsdl/wsdl.tar.gz ~/.virtualenvs/ptzipcam_env/lib/python3.7/site-packages/
 cd ~/.virtualenvs/ptzipcam_env/lib/python3.7/site-packages/
 tar xzf wsdl.tar.gz
 rm wsdl.tar.gz
 cd -