IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021 - 74

Special Section on Advances in Smart Cities
functionalities are available through the external
API. From user perspective, there is no difference
between these cameras and cameras using
local network video recording server-the user
can access camera live stream directly from the
smart home application, although this stream is
in fact served by the surveillance platform.
After the integration (see Figure 6), not only
are the video surveillance platform features
exposed to the users of the smart home applications,
but the functionality of the surveillance
platform can also be enhanced, by including cameras
into different home automation rules.
Namely, the integration with the smart home system
allows to react to different types of sensory
information, and record short videos not only
upon movement detection, but also in other
potential emergency situations. For example, if
the water leak is detected, the automation rule
can issue the command to the camera to start
recording. This short recording may provide the
user with the information about the actual level of
damage, thus allowing them to react accordingly.
As it can be observed in Table 1, the times needed
to send commands and to react to motion events
reported by surveillance platform are acceptable
for realistic scenarios. Device inclusion process
takes longer to complete, as it includes ONVIF
communication between the camera and the hub,
the authorization handshake between smart
home and surveillance platform clouds, and camera
restart.
CONCLUSION
The proposed representation of the external
services as virtual devices in the smart home
system opens a range of possibilities to design
and develop advanced user scenarios, which
enhance the experience of smart home users.
The integration with third-party platforms also
opens the possibility for users to access different
metropolitan level services, and make them
a part of their daily routine. This places the
smart home into the context of its geographical
location, allows the users to engage with the
community, and could drive the faster development,
adoption, and convergence of the smart
cities. Of course, since the APIs exposed by the
external services and platforms differ, the proposed
approach requires creating multiple
adapters in the smart home cloud. However, as
the metropolitan level services converge into a
unified smart city platform, less different service
adapters will be needed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by the Ministry
of Education, Science and Technological Development
through the project no. 451-03-68/202014/200156:
" Innovative scientific and artistic
research from the FTS activity domain " .
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