👁️ Yunleng

云棱 · A local MCP server that turns your cameras into tools your AI can call.

Your agent can read ten thousand files in a minute. It can browse the whole internet, write a novel, debug a kernel, beat you at chess. But right now, it has no idea what your face looks like.

Yunleng fixes that. Point your laptop camera at yourself and wave — your agent sees it. Set your phone on a tripod facing your desk and your agent watches both angles at once. No cloud, no black box, no API keys. Just a Python process on your machine that hands your AI a pair of eyes.

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Built by a student at Northwestern Polytechnical University (西工大) who got tired of AI agents being blind.

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Why this exists

The MCP ecosystem has servers for browsers, databases, file systems, git, Slack, you name it. A whole economy of tools that let AI touch the world.

Almost nobody built one for seeing it.

Your phone has three lenses. Your laptop has a webcam. Your AI agent can use exactly zero of them. That gap is what this project fills — a first-class, local-first vision channel for agents, with no cloud round-trip.

What it can do

👀 See multiple cameras at once. Auto-discovers every camera on your machine, and you can add your phone as a second angle over WiFi (IP Webcam / RTSP). Stereo capture with millisecond-aligned timestamps — your agent watches two sides of the room simultaneously.

🎛️ Fine-tune the shot. 20 camera properties exposed: brightness, contrast, exposure, white balance, focus, zoom, and more. Every set is read back and confirmed — no silent failures, no "trust me it worked".

🌙 Take smart photos. Dark scene? It brightens. Overexposed? It pulls it down. White balance corrected before you even finish the sentence. One call, a decent photo comes out the other end.

✋ Read your hands. MediaPipe underneath, seven gestures: open palm, fist, thumbs up, peace, OK, heart, and the one-finger "1". Rule-based and fully interpretable — no training, no black box, every decision traceable to a geometry check.

🎯 Detect objects (optional). YOLO, install-on-demand. Defaults to yolov8n and swaps to your own weights with one env var.

🧠 Understand the scene. Hand a frame to your local Ollama vision model (qwen2.5vl) and get back a plain-language description. Fully offline, fully private.

Install

git clone https://github.com/ChenLaoshiYF/yunleng.git
cd yunleng
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate      # Windows (macOS/Linux: source .venv/bin/activate)
pip install -e .
python scripts/download_models.py

That's it — four dependencies: mcp, opencv-python, numpy, mediapipe.

Optional YOLO object detection:

pip install -e ".[objects]"

Connect to your agent

Claude Desktop example — add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "camera-vision": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/your/.venv/Scripts/python.exe",
      "args": ["-m", "camera_mcp.server"],
      "cwd": "/absolute/path/to/yunleng"
    }
  }
}

Then just talk to your agent:

"Look at the camera and tell me what you see."

"What gesture am I making?"

"Take a photo and save it."

Use your phone as a second eye

Install any IP Webcam app on your phone, join the same WiFi as your computer, start streaming, then hand the URL to your agent:

add_remote_camera url="http://192.168.x.x:8080/video"

Done. Your laptop's blind spot is now covered.

Scene understanding (optional)

analyze_scene needs a local Ollama with a vision model:

1. Install Ollama: https://ollama.com
2. Pull a vision model: ollama pull qwen2.5vl

If Ollama isn't running, that one tool returns a clear error message. Everything else keeps working.

Configuration (env vars)

Variable	What it does	Default
CAMERA_MCP_HAND_MODEL	Path to the hand-landmark model	project models/ dir
CAMERA_MCP_YOLO_MODEL	Path to a YOLO weights file	yolov8n.pt
CAMERA_MCP_OLLAMA_MODEL	Ollama vision model name	qwen2.5vl
CAMERA_MCP_OLLAMA_URL	Ollama server address	http://localhost:11434

The 13 tools

Tool	What it does
list_cameras	List every camera (local + remote)
capture_frame	Grab one frame, return base64 JPEG
capture_stereo	Two cameras at once, timestamps aligned
get_camera_property	Read all 20 adjustable parameters
set_camera_property	Set a parameter, read back the actual value
smart_capture	Scene-aware photo (auto brightness + white balance)
auto_focus	Software autofocus — picks the sharpest frame
set_exposure	Auto / manual exposure control
add_remote_camera	Register a phone / IP camera
remove_remote_camera	Remove a remote camera
detect_gestures	Seven-gesture recognition
detect_objects	YOLO object detection (optional)
analyze_scene	Describe the frame via local Ollama

Design choices worth knowing

• Cameras are opened per-call and released immediately. No lingering handles, no resource leaks on marathon sessions.
• Models load once, shared process-wide. The first call is slow, everything after is fast.
• Graceful degradation everywhere. No Ollama? No YOLO? Those tools tell you clearly instead of crashing the server.
• Layered architecture (v0.2.0). camera/ abstracts backends (local/remote) behind a single interface; vision/ owns scene detection + enhancement + VLM understanding. The MCP layer stays thin and stable on top.

Battle-tested

Smoke tests run against a live server over real MCP — 16/16 checks green:

• Handshake, all 13 tools registered ✔
• Camera enumeration + property read/write ✔
• Remote camera add/remove + frame capture ✔
• Stereo capture with ~1ms drift, timestamps aligned ✔
• Smart capture, autofocus, exposure ✔
• Scene understanding degrades gracefully without Ollama ✔

Long-run stability: 10/10 frames over 300s, zero failures, flat memory.

The full suite is in scripts/ — smoke_test.py, stability_check.py, long_run_test.py. Don't take my word for it; run them yourself.

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Related projects

Part of the ChenLaoshiYF open-source family:

• mcpguard 明棱 — AI agent security scanner: detects prompt injection, tool poisoning and hidden instructions in MCP servers and skills
• chening 陈棱 — CUMCM math modeling AI skill pack for Chinese national contest students
• zhiyin 纸音 — real-time Russian→Chinese interpretation for online classes

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License

MIT

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Yunleng — 云棱, the cloud's edge. The place where AI finally starts looking at the world.

Star it if you want your agents to see too. ⭐

Docker

容器化运行（MCP stdio 模式），镜像托管在 GHCR：

docker run --rm ghcr.io/chenlaoshiyf/yunleng:latest 

镜像随 master 分支自动构建推送。