Viewing and storing images from an IP Camera

So you bought an IP camera and would like to store/see images from the camera using Java. Recently I bought a couple of IP Cameras for testing purposes. I noticed that each IP camera has different surveillance tools and web interfaces. But most of them have in common that you can access the actual picture by entering an URL in your browser.

In this post I'll show you how to see that image and store it using a very simple Java application. The camera I'll use for the test is a LinkSys WVC200 "Wireless PTZ Internet Camera with Audio". This is the cheapest wireless IPcam I found with at least some decent features.

This camera has a nice web interface, but for visualization purposes, you will need to be sitting in front of a windows desktop. This camera, as many others, uses an ActiveX control to show/control the image. However, LinkSys is kind enough to offer the camera's Firmware source code.

If you analyze the source code you can find some clues to get the URL where the static image is served (there's an URL for ASF video format too, with some time you can develop an app to store and play the video). For this camera, the URL is http://CAMERAIP/img/snapshot.cgi?size=640x480".

With this information, we can build an application to grab the image and show/store the image. If you have another type of camera, you can adapt the program by specifying the URL for that camera.

1try {
2  // Build a new URL specifying the path to where the image
3  // is served 
4  URL url = new URL ( "http://192.168.10.80/img/snapshot.cgi?size=640x480");
5  // String with the user and password to access the camera interface
6  // (userName and password that you would enter in the browser
7  String userPassword = "USER:PASSWORD";
8  // We must encode with Base64 to supply it with the header.
9  String encoding = new Base64Encoder(userPassword).processString();
10  // Open the connection
11  URLConnection uc = url.openConnection();
12  // Specify the authorization
13  uc.setRequestProperty ("Authorization", "Basic " + encoding);
14  // Load a copy of the image into memory
15  BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(uc.getInputStream());
16  // Show the image in a JLabel 
17  jLImagen.setIcon(new ImageIcon(img));
18  // Store the image in the specified path
19  ImageIO.write(img, "jpg", new File("pathToFile"));
20} catch (MalformedURLException ex) {
21  ex.printStackTrace();
22} catch (IOException ex) {
23  ex.printStackTrace(); 
24}

Extending this simple application by adding some functionality can bring a very good surveillance application. If you analyze most commercial surveillance applications to use with different ipCameras you'll notice that although they are very expensive the core of the application is similar to the 10 lines of code above.