Millions of cameras are openly connected to the Internet for a variety of purposes. This paper takes advantage of this resource to gather visual data. This camera data could be used for a myriad of purposes by solving two problems. (i) The network camera image data needs context to solve real world problems. (ii) While contextual data is available, it is not centrally aggregated. The goal is to make it easy to leverage the vast amount of network cameras. The database allows users to aggregate camera data from over 119,000 network camera sources all across the globe in real time. This paper explains how to collect publicly available information from network cameras. The paper describes how to analyze websites to retrieve relevant information about the cameras and to calculate the refresh rates of the cameras.
Ryan Dailey, Ahmed S. Kaseb, Chandler Brown, Sam Jenkins, Sam Yellin, Fengjian Pan, Yung-Hsiang Lu, "Creating the World's Largest Real-Time Camera Network" in Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Imaging and Multimedia Analytics in a Web and Mobile World, 2017, pp 5 - 12, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2017.10.IMAWM-160