AwareCam: AI-Powered Cloud Video Surveillance

MicrocosmWorks designed AwareCam with a pull-based stream lifecycle that only activates streaming when a viewer requests it, with TTL-based automatic shutdown. AI event detection runs on the cloud side where the auto-scaling MediaMTX orchestrator processes streams, analyzing frames for 8 event types including person detection, loitering, and zone intrusion. The Cloudflare Worker edge proxy caches HLS segments to reduce origin bandwidth, while bounding-box annotation snapshots are stored rather than full video, minimizing storage costs.

MicrocosmWorks delivered 8 AI event types: person detection, loitering, intrusion zone violation, motion detection, vehicle detection, PPE compliance, safety hazard, and zone activity monitoring. Each event includes bounding-box snapshot annotation and severity scoring that feeds into the alerting engine. The system supports configurable detection sensitivity thresholds and zone definitions per camera, allowing operators to reduce false positives in their specific environment.

MicrocosmWorks built an event-driven alerting pipeline that routes AI detections to configured channels based on event type and severity. Email and SMS alerts go through Twilio, WhatsApp notifications use the Twilio WhatsApp Business API, and Slack and Microsoft Teams receive webhook-formatted alerts. Additionally, Zapier, Make.com, and n8n webhook integrations allow operators to connect AwareCam alerts to any downstream workflow system.

MicrocosmWorks engineered the Streaming Orchestrator as a FastAPI microservice that manages MediaMTX server lifecycle with auto-scaling DigitalOcean droplet provisioning. When camera load exceeds a server's capacity, the orchestrator spins up additional streaming nodes, distributes cameras across the pool using buffer-based load balancing, and rebalances streams when nodes are added or removed. The entire provisioning and scaling process is automatic and transparent to end users.

MicrocosmWorks implemented 5-tier Stripe subscription billing with camera-limit enforcement at the API level. Each plan tier permits a specific maximum number of registered cameras, and the system blocks camera registration attempts that would exceed the limit while showing upgrade prompts. The subscription engine handles hosted checkout, billing portal access, webhook-driven plan changes, trial management, and organization-level billing for multi-tenant deployments.