A real security camera uploads your driveway, your face, and your neighbours to someone else's cloud. To show local AI does not have to, we built a demo (an illustrative example, not a QVAC product) that detects people, vehicles, and bags, judges whether a scene looks normal or high-risk, and raises an alarm, all on your own machine, with no frame ever leaving the device.
Security cameras have a privacy problem hiding in plain sight: to be "smart", most of them stream your front door to a company's servers, where your footage becomes someone else's data to keep. The useful part (spotting a person, flagging something wrong) and the safe part (nobody else sees your home) pull apart.
Running the AI on the device closes that gap. To show what that looks like, we built QVAC Smart Camera: an illustrative example, not a product, that watches a scene, understands what is in it, and decides whether to raise an alarm, entirely on-device. It is built on the QVAC SDK, and the point is the pattern, so you can clone it and make it your own.
Repo: github.com/tetherto/qvac-examples
Point it at a video clip or a webcam:
This demo uses QVAC's on-device vision stack: real-time object detection plus a vision-language model that can look at a frame and reason about it in plain language. Two models cooperate, both 100% local:
The risk verdict is a hybrid, so it stays reliable on a small model: the vision-language model writes the reason, and a simple deterministic rule (a person right next to a vehicle, at night, inferred from frame brightness) guarantees the alarm fires on the classic "someone at the car in the dark" case. The browser only smooths boxes and checks brightness. No external CDN, no cloud call.
Not sure your machine can handle it? Run this:
npx -y @qvac/cli doctor.git clone https://github.com/tetherto/qvac-examples
cd qvac-examples/qvac-smart-camera
npm install
# generate the object model once (see models/README.md)
npm startOpen http://localhost:3080, choose a clip or a webcam, pick what to alert on, and start monitoring. QVAC is open source (Apache 2.0) and free. Docs: docs.qvac.tether.io.
This is not a QVAC product and not a real security or surveillance system. It is an illustrative example, provided "as is", to show what a local AI app can do with the QVAC SDK. You alone are responsible for how you use it, including complying with applicable privacy, recording, and surveillance laws and obtaining any consent required.
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