Is this just for fun or do you need a very good quality image. If a cheap 240 line video camera will work you have lots of options. If you would like a better image for not a lot of money look at some of the digital cameras which are supported under Linux. Some of them have view finder video out (Canon G3 I think) which can be feed into a frame grabber board, then when motion is detected a high resolution image can be snapped and downloaded into the computer.
If you go the frame grabber route I have software that runs on Fedora Core 2 that I use for timing bicycle time trials. It works by doing a motion detect and saving the image with a time stamp. I also have a version that uses a photo eye connected to the printer port to detect when to save an image. It would not take much to adapt it to surveillance work. The only problem is that it is not up to open source standards. In other words I still need to clean it up a bit, OK a lot. You are welcome to it, even the source code, but not under the GPL. Sorry, I do not want my messy work out in public. When I have time I am working on cleaning up the software. When it is done I plan on releasing it under the GPL.
If you want to talk about more options e-mail me off list.
-Charles Fischer
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