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From White Dots

Hello, and welcome the White Dots wiki!

About White Dots

White Dots is an open source, not-for-profit initiative founded in May 2009 with the goal of creating and coordinating a volunteer-operated network of UFO-spotting webcams. Its goal is to significantly increase the quality and quantity of UFO sighting data. In particular, it will use views from multiple cameras to calculate the size, velocity, acceleration of the objects it catches on video.

See Project Philosophy.

Project Activities

1. Design an affordable UFO-spotting hardware kit (the "Tracking Device") that any interested volunteer can easily put together and install in their home
2. Write the open-source software necessary to run the kits
3. Build the central server infrastructure and software to correlate volunteer camera data, identify anomalies and to archive anomaly video data
4. Coordinate volunteer efforts to reach 'critical density' of volunteer cameras in key areas
5. Publish analyses of the data
6. Partner with other UFO organizations to further understanding of the UFO phenomenon

Project Status

White Dots is currently in the early planning phases. This is a large undertaking, and there are a lot of details to be worked out.

See Project Details.

How Will It Work?

This is the visual description. For more detail, glide on over to the Project Details.

1. You put a webcam in your window.	2. So does someone else in your neighbourhood.	3. Objects moving in the sky are tracked..	4. ..by your network-connected computer.
5. The regional server correlates the telemetry..	6. ..to produce a model of the object's motion.	7. Analyze the data, is it unusual?	8. If so, save all the video data.
9. Use telemetry to drive a pan/tilt/zoom cam.	10. Smile for your close-up, Mr. UFO!

This was the visual description. For more detail, see the Project Details.

Project Challenges

Looks simple enough, but there are quite a few challenges to be overcome to make the project a reality.

• Camera and Appliance
  • Affordable: The camera and the attached computer need to be very affordable - definitely less than $500.
  • Image quality: the camera needs good resolution - 2MP at a minimum, with enough sensitivity that it can produce decent images at night.
  • "Dot" detection approach: most security software is looking for people or vehicles; this needs to be able to find moving tiny specks and lights, but not be fooled by tree branches or street lights, and it needs to do it in near real time./ufo
  • Calibration: the system needs a very reliable method of determining where the cameras are and where they're pointing; a method that is resilient to occasional knocks and bumps, and which isn't demanding for the camera contributors.
• Overall
  • Coverage: getting enough cameras out there to get good, stereoscopic (or better) coverage
  • Hoaxes: the programmatic nature of the network may will make it easy to inject hoaxed data into (at least) the compressed telemetry data. Approaches to minimizing the impact this has need to be built into the system.
  • Funding: Not as exciting as the other challenges, but the server and video archive components will have real costs attached to them.
  • EMP attack by aliens: Well, no, not really.

Interested?

Are you interested in the project? If so, consider participating! There are lots of ways to help out:

• Would you like to contribute a camera to the network?
• Do you know someone else with a great view of the sky who might?
• Do you know any businesses, organizations or clubs that might be willing to host a more expensive, pan-tilt-zoom type security camera?
• Do you have any experience in geometry, amateur astronomy, computer vision, image processing, open source projects, security camera enclosures and/or installation, linux or network administration?
• Do you just have some constructive criticism or random advice?
• Do you know anyone else who might?

If so, please write to interested@whitedots.org

See Also

• Project Details
• Other Links of Interest
• Project Philosophy