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Show HN: I built a DIY plane spotting system at home

207 points| obviyus | 1 year ago |pilane.obviy.us

83 comments

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pkamb|1 year ago

Watching football this fall, I've been thinking about a little box that sits on my table and mutes the TV whenever an ad comes on.

Not decoding HDMI HDCP or anything, but a webcam + AI or whatever that watches football with me and mutes ads. Similar to plane detection, maybe. Are there any projects like this?

gosub100|1 year ago

I wanted to do this too! I'm an "idea man" that doesn,t deliver, though. Here is my feature list:

* auto commercial block using audio fingerprinting and duration, so if it finds the ad, it knows the ad will last 10-15-30-60 seconds.

* frame-slowdown. often ads just show way too many frame jumps in rapid succession. If this is detected, visual mute would freeze one of the frames and only allow a jump after 5-10s.

* visual mute - if the commercial is not identified audibly, have a blur or black box that covers 85% of the center of the screen. you would un-mute it when you recognize your game from the borders.

* logo-blur. OpenCV to recognize most common ad logos and blur or black them

* commercial-over-dub. allow funny joke audio to be played over existing, known commercials. So when they show insurance ads, someone can say "yeah they didn't pay my $40k roof claim because I didn't have hail coverage", right over the insurance logo

* announcer over-dub. This would allow aspiring sports announcers (or comedians) to have their audio played in place of the game audio. This would require some visual sync, which would include a few seconds of delay. I bet there are some really good announcers out there who would love a chance to announce a game. Also some really funny smart-asses , or you could choose a biased announcer who roots with you for YOUR team and disparages the other!

concerndc1tizen|1 year ago

Nice idea!

Related:

In Black Mirror, they pause the advertisement when you disable the sound.

So maybe you'll eventually have to use a separate sound system whereby they cannot detect that you're muting it.

Then, they'll track your eyes and require you to watch the screen :)

At which point do you stop consuming?

pplante|1 year ago

I'd settle for a device that just normalized the volume levels, but this would be even better!

konraditurbe|1 year ago

Usually football trasmissions have identifiable elements in the screen, such as the score, the match title, etc... and those are fixed elements that do not appear in ads. For example: https://i.imgur.com/blebca8.png

Or the title bar below. You could do some basic OCR on a Pi, when the team names are readable, keep the volume up, when they are not, disable it.

Alive-in-2025|1 year ago

Years ago Microsoft TV had a free 3rd party extension that analyzed the video and skipped the commercials. Amazingly you could see the downloaded video, there wasn't drm on that in the early days. There were several tools like this.

I think you could do this. If you had a web page logged into the same program it could analyze the video. I wonder if people build "video scraping" from web page tv apps, probably some drm blocking thing.

There also used to be subsonic chimes or something simila on the network tv audio to signal to some other server (maybe at the local tv station?) that would know to automatically run a commericial right now.

d33dd3d3|1 year ago

Looking at the electric consumption of my 30 closest neighbors using an RTL-SDR, I'm still wondering what I should do with the information.

rhcom2|1 year ago

Probably don't even need the webcam, detection via audio seems possible.

naveen_k|1 year ago

Perfect timing! I got annoyed by Ads in streaming services and decided to build something to mute the TV when an Ad comes on. Simple vision based system.

I'll post a write up in a few days.

benhoff|1 year ago

Rk3588's have HDMI input (I think with hdcp decoding) that you can use v4l2 API. The multiplane API can be a bit tricky, but otherwise somewhat trivial

savrajsingh|1 year ago

I have had this exact same idea, it’s a good one. We all hate ads, and muting the audio is all we really need!

gsich|1 year ago

Why not, HDCP is only a compliance scheme.

ideashower|1 year ago

how about fingerprinting? Not versed in this space but might be worth looking into.

mt_|1 year ago

I recommend to not show dates as it can easily help triangulate your location of where this Pi is running, and with the internet crowd, doxxing yourself is never a good idea.

gruez|1 year ago

How much accuracy can you possibly get from a 600x600 image?

jparishy|1 year ago

Really cool. I've considered doing something similar for alerting me of things seen in the air but without a transponder turned on. Good tip about the birds, I wouldn't have anticipated that ha.

Aside, the way air travel still happens out in the open in terms of communications data has a real early Internet vibe to me.

gosub100|1 year ago

related: automated Las Vegas plane spotting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5PtT7KdlKc

this person has some sort of OpenCV setup from a high-rise view. (bonus: Air Force One is currently there)

dylan604|1 year ago

I'm kind of surprised that they would park it next to other planes like that. Especially with what appears to be no ground troops surrounding the plane.

bazmattaz|1 year ago

This is great. So I’ve thought of doing something slightly similar but with a raspberry Pi and camera to identify if there is a free parking space right outside our house (we live in a terraced house with no driveway)

ge96|1 year ago

I think this has been done for public places. A lazy approach (not using ML) is cropping/contour finding, then masking (opencv) against an empty parking lot, so if something is there like a car, would change the result.

The black parking lot would change in shade/hue so have to account for a range.

dave333|1 year ago

Given that drone warfare is now a thing this seems like it could be useful as the basis of a personal drone detection and warning kit that soldiers could wear over their helmet to spot drones and give say an audible warning in the soldiers ears that lets the soldier locate the drone direction and maybe azimuth with pitch - lower frequency for a low drone and high for one more overhead. Not sure if such a thing already exists. That and a shotgun would be a reasonable defense.

nradov|1 year ago

Shotguns have proven ineffective as drone defenses. Range is too short and the targets are too fast.

neurostimulant|1 year ago

Very cool!

This plane suspiciously looks like a bird though: https://i.imgur.com/cUdnZTN.png

obviyus|1 year ago

Haha, I'm working on fixing that. One of my ideas is to run inference again on an image to check if it has any birds. If yes, reject the image.

It's a really cool time to be checking right now! All commercial flights are grounded in Delhi for Republic Day celebrations so I'm able to see images of Air Force planes!

cactusplant7374|1 year ago

You can see from the photos how people might mistake planes for drones or UAP's.

RIMR|1 year ago

Every single one of those pictures, even the blurry ones, even the ones taken at night, all look like airplanes.

People aren't getting airplanes confused with drones because they look the same. People are getting worked up about drones because of collective paranoia, and then they are seeing what they want to see.

dylan604|1 year ago

Um, no, I can't actually. Like, not even close to being able to relate to what you're suggesting. These are all single frames and frozen in time. Watching any of these actually moving would even reduce that possibility even further.

DoneWithAllThat|1 year ago

Not criticizing you but it will never not be funny to me that crazy people have tried to legitimize seeing alien spaceships by renaming them from UFOs to UAPs. It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of unhoused.

noppanut15|1 year ago

This is so cool!!! Thanks for sharing the setup as well.