A Dutch Engineer Makes A Face Recognition Gadget For His Cat

To ensure that his cat does not have to wait at the door too long before being able to come inside, a Dutch engineer decided to build a face recognition which can identify the cat and send him a notification.

Arkaitz Garro is the engineer mentioned above. He works at WeTransfer in Holland. The door at his house does not have a cat-flap, so every single time, his cat wants to go inside, it needs to wait until his wife, or he notices it outside the door. So he needed to think of a solution to this.

Rather than installing a cat-flap, he decided to take a step toward technology involving a messaging app, face recognition software, motion-detection sensors, and AI. You might think it is time-consuming to make something like that, but Arkaitz says that he only spent a few hours as the software and hardware he used is accessible to everyone.

According to Arkaitz, the cat actually had an owner, who resided just a few blocks away and was willing to “share” the pet. Therefore, the cat has now set up a specific time when he would come to Arkaitz’s house.

That’s when the problem emerger. Neither Arkaitz nor his wife had time to wait for the cat to show up at the door, so they needed to do something.

With a Raspberry Pi mini-computer and a camera, Arkaitz designed a device that would utilize image-recognition and motion-detection AI software to identify the cat automatically and send him a message so that he could let the cat in.

He explained:

If the machine recognizes the cat, not just some other cat, animal or a piece of litter, it will alert Arkaitz with a message through the Slack messaging app.

Arkaitz continued:

But ultimately, the device proved to be the right solution to his problem.