Duck Defense

Inspiration

We want to improve public safety and reduce crime

Median crime report delay: 10 min
When police response time above 5 min, arrest probability falls from 60% to 20% (US Department of Justice)

Proactive surveillance would improve police response times, provide better situational awareness for law enforcement, and act as a crime deterrent

In New Orleans, average response times almost tripled, from 51 minutes in 2019 to 146 minutes last year. In New York, the number jumped less, from 18 minutes to 33. (NPR.org)

What it does

A security camera that detects criminal activities in public spaces as they occur via natural language processing + sentiment analysis of auditory surveillance and live video monitoring.

How we built it

We used React.js to build our frontend. To process the audio, we used Mozilla's WebSpeech API to transcribe the audio to text in real time. We send the transcribed text to the backend every 5 seconds if new audio was transcribed. We used the Cohere API to determine if the text might be indicativeof a delicate situation and then use the twilio API to notify the emergency contact. This is done on our backend built with Node.js and Express.

Challenges we ran into

We had a multitude of integration pains that we had to smoothen out. Getting the APIs to work in the way we wanted proved to be more challenging than we expected. Additionally, setting up any sort of SQL database proved to have various complications with different operating systems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we learned about the software development process throughout this hackathon. We ran into many challenges and roadblocks but we learned how to resolve them properly. We also learned much more about how the tech stack works.

What's next for Duck Defense

We want to work with a Postgres database that allows for an authentication system as well as storing preferred emergency contacts. We hope to add Arduino code that allows for a rotating camera since we already have the CAD for the duck and the ability to track movement using the webcam. OAuth, SQL, Rotating camera, Additional context from video