Concept #1 : Kitchen Plague Detector

One thing I know for sure… in my next life I’m going to be either a mouse, a rat or a roach. The reason I know that for sure is because I’ve killed so many since I’ve moved to Brooklyn that I have perfected my technique in ways I almost want to write a handbook about: Mice have really good hearing but they don’t have good eyes. If you stay still long enough they’ll start coming out from the corners. Or Rats, they are just messy and loud. They’ll just chomp through a box instead of trying to open it. Rats are zero stealth but they are damn fast. They can jump to places you can’t imagine (like to the top of a table) and eat through a wall. Roaches on the other hand, they basically hate humans, they go out when you are not there and pretend they are dead when you look at them.

So, what we know is that plagues: a. follow certain patterns , b. You’ll never see them enjoying themselves because they are always running from you. For every time you don’t see them , they are 100x on your food, on your clothes, on your dishes, etc. Maybe you just don’t want to know and pretend they don’t exist… or, you can use technology to reveal what really is going on =).

Plan of Action

We are going to design an hypothetical gadget that will capture images of the mice, rats or roaches while they are roaming around looking for food or just hanging out in an open space. This gadget would be a home version of the movement triggered cameras that nature photographers use to capture wildlife.

1. Gadget is placed on floor level pointing to a corner or hole were the animal or insect is suspected to come from. Optionally, it could be pointing to a bait that we have setup for this purpose.
2. Camera sends frames at a constant rate to the Stick GPU running the program
3. Frame is input to the Movement detection neural network
4. If Movement is detected, Frame is input to the Plague detection neural network
5. If a rat, mouse or roach is detected, image is stored in Flash Drive.
6. Once every hour, images are posted to IFTTT to a rule that send them to your email.

Further improvements

• Have the program remember if is there have been recent events and have it in state of alert
• Infer the presence of the Rat,Mouse or Roach from multiple frames (instead of one frame).
• Use a microphone to cross reference sounds with images.

Design Notes

+ Even though a GPU Stick is the best option, a Raspberry Pi 3 could be capable to do the job. I’ve successfully run a face detection NN, a face recognition NN and a QR Code reader NN on a Raspberry Pi 3 in other projects.

+ No NN training is assumed.

+ I’ve never seen a Plague detection NN out there, it is just hypothetical. There is a big possibility that it is not even possible to build because of light conditions and size and speed of mice and rats.

+ The Internet Connection to IFTT is entirely optional. The user could retrieve the images from the SD Card directly.

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This idea follows the Zombie Home Manifest