Is it there?

My mom, always grabs her mail, and she always puts it in the same place, but sometimes she forgets to mention it to me.  On occasion, when a piece of mail gets around my mail forwarding, then I'd like to know it exists.  So the last time I visited home I set up a webcam connected to my mom's computer, positioned directly above her mail spot.  From there all that was left was to set up a simple Python script to check to see if there is mail there.

I wanted something that works, and not the most complicated solution.  Grabbing the picture wasn't too hard, I tried a few methods I found online, but couldn't get one to work (this time I'm programming on Windows instead of Linux, so I may have had some issues there), but I ended up finding VideoCapture and with a few lines of code I got it working.

From there I used Pillow to scale down the image to a single pixel(think of taking the average of all the colors of an image).  This pixel is represented by a series of three numbers between 0 and 255 representing its RGB values.  For example white is (255,255,255), black is (0,0,0), blue is (0,0,255), etc. 

Now I just needed to compare that color to a stored color. I've worked with colors in Python before, and if you're thinking of the doing something with colors I would suggest using the colormath package.  Here I went with the quick and dirty and just calculated the Euclidean Distance between the two colors: d = sqrt((a₁-b₁)²+(a₂-b₂)²+(a₃-b₃)²).  For example the distance between lime green (34,255,0) and pink (255, 204, 229) is about 322.

If the distance (d) between the two colors exceeds a predetermined threshold, then the script sends an email to me with the original picture, and I know to bring it up in our next talk!

If you want to take a look at the code, take a look at it on my Github.