The Couch Defender is a Flutter-based mobile app designed to monitor your furniture and prevent your pets from occupying it. The concept is simple: repurpose a spare smartphone as a dedicated device for the app. Position the phone so that its camera overlooks the couch or any furniture you want to protect, and use the app to designate a "no-go" zone within the camera's view.

The core of this application is an off the shelf object detection model. Once a pet is detected in the forbidden zone, the app triggers a user-recorded message. If it's the first transgression within a certain timeframe, a gentle reminder like, "Hey, I see you, get off please," might suffice. If the pet remains after a few seconds, the app escalates to a more assertive message, and so on. Users can select from two pre-built object detection models: ssd_mobilenet and yolov2_tiny, based on their preferences and needs.

Beyond its functionality, this app provides a lot of entertainment. It saves snapshots of the pets caught red-handed, resulting in a collection of hilarious images of guilty pets reacting to a disembodied voice admonishing them mid-slumber.

The effectiveness of this app is proven. Within a few days, our dog no longer attempted to take over the couch, and we were able to remove the monitoring phone from the living room. Now, the Couch Defender stands as a testament to the surprising ways technology can solve our everyday problems.

I've recently moved the code to github, but have not started any cleanup yet.