Nowadays, we often use computers and connected devices. Most of them have an embedded webcam: computers and mobile phones are just a few examples. These cameras are very useful for communicating through social networks. However, this technology shows dangers: some hackers are able to exploit your webcam to spy on you.
The purpose of this article is to raise awareness and make recommendations on the use of web cameras.
To do this, I propose Kivy Camera, an application that recovers the video stream from your webcam to display it on the screen. The application has the following features:

• Camera connection (webcam)
• Capture of video stream
• Picture taking

The KivyCam application and its graphical interface are built with the Kivy framework.
Kivy is a cross-platform framework that allows you to create graphical interfaces for Python applications. The advantages of this framework are its power and its simplicity regarding implementation.
Its use in this project is based on a need for simplicity and lightness.

Before going into design, it is good practice to plan the project, even for a small application.
This project was therefore organized through Gantt planning:

The interface of the Kivy Camera application has been designed and implemented with the idea of simplicity in mind:

This interface is enhanced with several buttons where each one corresponds to an action:

• START button, starts the webcam and video stream capture.
• STOP button, completes the capture of the video stream. This action is accompanied by a return to the "main screen"
• SCREENSHOT button, takes an instant screenshot from the data contained in the video stream at a t time, only if the video stream capture is active.

Image capture is a feature of the application that allows the user to take instant photographs of his webcam.

By pressing the SCREENSHOT button while capturing the video stream, a capture is saved as an image file in the "screenshots" folder at the root of the application folder.

The prerequisites for launching Kivy Camera are to install, if this is not already the case:

• Python3 and pip
• Kivy

							
								python3 --version
							
						

							
								/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
								brew install python
							
						

							
								sudo apt-get install python3
								sudo apt-get install python3-pip
							
						

							
								python3 --version
								pip3 --version
								pip --version
							
						

							
								/* Tout d’abord, pour éviter des problèmes, veuillez à mettre à jour pip : */
								python -m pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools virtualenv
								python -m pip install docutils pygments pypiwin32 kivy_deps.sdl2==0.1.22 kivy_deps.glew==0.1.12
								python -m pip install kivy_deps.gstreamer==0.1.17
								/* Avec python 3.5+, kivy_deps.angle à la place de glew : */
								python -m pip install kivy_deps.angle==0.1.9
								python -m pip install kivy==1.11.1
							
						

							
								python -m pip install kivy
								python -m pip install ffpyplayer
							
						

							
								python -m pip install --upgrade --user pip setuptools virtualenv
								python -m pip install kivy
								python -m pip install ffpyplayer
							
						

This part may require basic technical skills in Python.
If you want to test the application, I invite you to download the project from the address https://github.com/ValentinDumas/KivyCam.
Once the code has been downloaded from the Github link, open the archive to access the files. You can use the 7zip software to open the archive, downloadable at https://www.7-zip.org. As an alternative to 7zip, we can suggest WinRar, downloadable at https://www.win-rar.com/start.html?&L=10.
To use the application, open a console window (cmd.exe). Then move to the project folder "cd path_to_project_folder". Then execute the following command to launch the application: "python camlayout.py"

The use of this application and webcams in general raises several points related to an ethical dimension.

We could go further in the development of the Kivy Camera application by offering:

• A video recording using two buttons, start and end of capture
• Give a user the possibility to choose the machine to which he wants to connect through a network
• Propose an "automatic launch" script or an executable of the application for all platforms
• An executable of the application can be added on Github in the "Release" section to improve visibility