We've created a few plugins for ispy to add additional functionality like numberplate (license plate) recognition, facial recognition and more.

Installation

Installing a plugin is easy, just unzip the files below into the "C:\Program Files (x86)\iSpy\iSpy\Plugins" directory and restart iSpy.

The plugins add additional features to the alert type drop-down menu on the edit camera tab. Click the "..." button next to this to configure the plugins:

 

Numberplate Recognition

This will alert when license plates are either recognised or not recognised in a pre-determined list. This plugin is experimental - depending on the style of license plates in  your country you may have varying results. Detailed guide to ALPR.

>> Download Screenshot Source Code

Face Recognition

This will alert you if the camera recognises a human face. It will ignore all other movement so is good for reducing false alerts. The screenshot shows it working whilst monitoring the desktop.

>> Download Screenshot Source Code

Text Overlay and Detection

This plugin provides a user-definable area to overlay text from a specified text file. You can setup an alert to trigger if a specific keyword or phrase is detected in the text. You can use this plugin to feed text overlays into your videos from external applications. When the text in the file is changed iSpy will update the text displayed on the video.

>> Download Source Code

Barcode Scanning

This lets you create and scan barcodes and QR codes. You can provide a list of allowed barcode text that when scanned will trigger an alert (run a program, play a sound, call a command to unlock the door etc).

>> Download Screenshot Source Code

 

Creating your own plugin is easy! Download our demo project to get started (visual studio 2010 required). This project adds a new alert type into the list ("Demo"), draws a diagonal line on the video and triggers an alert if you set the width of the line to 2px. To install it, compile the project and then just drop the demo.dll file into the iSpy plugins directory. If you create a useful or just plain cool plugin please send it to us to share it with other iSpy users.

Plugins that perform complicated analysis should process in their own thread and update the UI asynchronously. See the source for the face recognition or numberplate recognition project for an example.

Important: iSpy uses reflection to load in plugins. Your plugin will need to have a "Main" class in a "Plugins" namespace - see the demo project for an example.