If a camera takes a picture and no one notices, did it really happen? In this book, we’re going to show you how to make a working Raspberry Pi–based camera system so that you can capture time-lapse images and view via WiFi, trigger the camera if motion is detected, and even carry out basic facial recognition as an introduction to machine learning methods. Take a Raspberry Pi and add a camera module, and you have a programmable camera. Add some software, and you can start to do interesting surveillance and automatic object recognition work with it. Activate the Pi as a WiFi node and you can do all these wonderful things from a distance. A good surveillance system does more than take pictures. It should also turn those pictures into actionable information that increases your knowledge. That’s now easily done in software, and we’re going to show you how.