If you already have a camera pointed at the street, it
can put marked government vehicles on a public map without you buying
anything or changing how the camera works.
Your camera stays yoursThe video never leaves your
network. SparrowMap never connects to your camera and is never given the
password.
One small picture leavesA crop of a vehicle, shrunk below
the size a number plate can be read at. The server refuses anything
bigger.
You are not publishing a feedNo live view, no recordings,
no footage of your customers or your door. A dot on a road, and a photo
only after a person confirms it is a government vehicle.
What you need
A computer on the same network as the camera that can stay on:
any Windows, Mac or Linux machine, including the one already running your
recorder. It is not heavy work — measured at 0.02 to 0.04 seconds a
frame on an ordinary processor, with no graphics card needed.
1 Where is the camera?
Drag the marker to the camera itself, not to the road. Which
stretch of road it watches is set afterwards, on the aiming page.
Pin moved to that address. Now drag it
onto the camera itself — the address finds the building, not the
corner of it the camera sits on.
2 Keep these
Copy these now. The token is shown once and cannot be looked up.
They are also saved in this browser, so the aiming and
review pages on this device will already know about the camera.
3 Your camera's stream address
Every brand words it differently. If you do not know it, the
first command below prints the usual shapes and tests whichever you
try — it sends nothing anywhere.
Use the SUB stream where the camera offers one. A 4K
main stream is wasted here and much harder to decode; the vehicle only
needs to be a few hundred pixels across.
4 Run it
Easiest: download the app, open it, and paste the
three boxes above into it. No terminal at all.
The downloaded file already has your camera's details in it.
It carries the token, so treat it like a password: it lets a machine post
sightings as this camera.
5 Point it at the road
Now say which way it looks. The next page puts a cone on
the map: drag it round to cover the stretch of road the camera actually
sees, set how far it reaches, and save. The map needs this or its
sightings have nowhere to sit.