Dedicated License Plate Cam project

[DanPOE]

why not here (forgive bad editing...)?

View attachment 10832

the setup could be made to look like a light pole of sorts if a birdhouse on the dside of the road looks too odd...
you'd have a lot better angle and closer view on cars going in either/both directions. being closer to your targets
would make the rest a lot easier...

Where I show it, it would slightly be concealed by a tree behind it. Closer to the street where you show it, it is more likely to get vandalized or the neighbor runs it over with their car.

I get about the same angle to the street from an upstairs window, so I may even go that route. Burying the cable would be a pain since there are buried utilities I'd have to deal with.

 

[DanPOE]

why's your ppf so low? here's my capture points for both front and rear plates.

Ah.. I didn't change edit camera and it defaults to 1080p. Setting to 4MP now says 108.6ppf

 

[pozzello]

probably incorrect resolution and/or focal length (lens) specified in the tool...

 

[nayr]

increase the zoom until you get >150ppf, with that 2nd to last location move the camera so it intersects with the driveway to the west.. see my arrangment.. this prevents anyone from parking infront of the camera... as most places its illegal to block a driveway and you can get anyone towed who does.

you dont need the width to take up the whole street.. just the far lane, anyone in the near lane will be even closer.

 

[DanPOE]

The 3rd location would be from the house to that location. I would thread the needle between two trees.

 

[DanPOE]

increase the zoom until you get >150ppf, with that 2nd to last location move the camera so it intersects with the driveway to the west.. see my arrangment.. this prevents anyone from parking infront of the camera... as most places its illegal to block a driveway and you can get anyone towed who does.

you dont need the width to take up the whole street.. just the far lane, anyone in the near lane will be even closer.

option 2 with zoom increased as you suggest. (blue line is existing utilities)



option 3 with zoom increased as you suggest.

 

[nayr]

id say go the other direction, to the east and use a buttload of zoom.. you have more options, and the road curves to the north slightly affording a bit of southernly sunlight.. honestly if you had to pick I'd say read plates in a north/south road than east/west, the light will be more consistant throughout the day.. im trying HDR mode right now because I am looking east and in the evenings it can get a mean ass glare that over exposes the plate.

 

[DanPOE]

id say go the other direction, to the east and use a buttload of zoom.. you have more options, and the road curves to the north slightly affording a bit of southernly sunlight.. honestly if you had to pick I'd say read plates in a north/south road than east/west, the light will be more consistant throughout the day.. im trying HDR mode right now because I am looking east and in the evenings it can get a mean ass glare that over exposes the plate.

And I like that option because vehicles will have to slow at the end of the street, less motion blue.

Ideally I would place it at the curb concealed on the mailbox post pointing west. But running cable is the pain.

 

[nayr]

and at those distances less motion means you can run a lower shutter speed with less gain, and that makes it easier to get enough IR.. I think you'd struggle if you had to run 1/1000 at those distances due to the mean angle.

here in colorado plates dont really ever expire, if you own a vehicle 20 years you have 20 year old plates on em.. regardless any design changes that have taken place since then, this makes it a bit more difficult for me because some people with really old plates dont reflect very well and I have to bump the gain up more than I'd like.. back in KS they re-issued plates every decade or so and if your locality is like this you might get better night time results.

I was having a hell of a time reading old work trucks at night at low gain (gain = noise), I just went from 35 gain to 50 gain and its alot better but it was a sacrifice in quality.

 

[DanPOE]

and at those distances less motion means you can run a lower shutter speed with less gain, and that makes it easier to get enough IR.. I think you'd struggle if you had to run 1/1000 at those distances due to the mean angle.

here in colorado plates dont really ever expire, if you own a vehicle 20 years you have 20 year old plates on em.. regardless any design changes that have taken place since then, this makes it a bit more difficult for me because some people with really old plates dont reflect very well and I have to bump the gain up more than I'd like.. back in KS they re-issued plates every decade or so and if your locality is like this you might get better night time results.

I was having a hell of a time reading old work trucks at night at low gain (gain = noise), I just went from 35 gain to 50 gain and its alot better but it was a sacrifice.

I need to deal mainly with VA,MD,DC plates. VA and MD have a lot of variations and some even start with two really small vertical letters.

 

[tangent]

I have some remote property I would like to deploy this technology on, have it sms me license plate numbers of anyone coming up the drive, but not if I cant get it to work on a really low power system that can be completely disguised in some rugged country.

ALPR onsite at remote property is probably excessive, you could probably just MMS or M2M a 720p pic and process it offsite. Depending on how remote we're talking it might be a matter of if somebody drives by this point and it isn't you they're lost or up to no good. A buried vehicle sensing cable (minimize false positives) and r-pi/beagle with a BT dongle as a beacon to detect your phone if you want. Depending on power needs you could put some bigger solar panels far enough out of sight that they aren't very noticeable and run power underground back to a handhole.

I've toyed with some similar projects on paper for a remote area in noco at a place my parent's own. They have a bad neighbor who might react badly if they noticed the cams. I'm thinking about a bird/bat house cam with no IR, but humidity monitoring in the crawlspace is actually a higher priority for me currently. I wish the cheap products off ali for this weren't all 2G. One of these days I'll probably get around to building it myself, but I need to rebuild my toaster reflow oven first.

 

[CamFan]

I Would see the value in it if you had a $3/mo M2M plan that gives you 1MB of data, like Particle Electron.

 

[nayr]

I love my reflow toaster oven, I use a panasonic IR oven and built my own pid controller using osPID firmware.. here is my RoHS reflow, Red is actual, Green is requested, and blue is duty cycle.

And to get our asses back on topic, here is short video of OpenALPR fighting over 2 cars at night:
tip: click gear and change playback speed to .5

each time you see the OSD change was a capture and its best guess, if it was different than the capture before.. sometimes its best guess is wrong, but the right result is still in the top 10 so correlating it correctly is a piece of cake.

also keep in mind that video is a mere 720p, and not the actual 4mp glory that alprd is working with.

 

[DanPOE]

For those who are running CAT externally are you taking any network precautions? Someone could simply plugin and have internet access without precautions. My main concern would be for someone having access resources on the home network.

I've placed all cameras on a dedicated switch and a POE injector, so hopefully any lightning strike would stop at that switch. For overall security I run an Active Directory domain for all desktops and servers which should keep anyone out of network resources.

I'm thinking I really need to further lock-down any outside CAT drops by placing them in a VLAN that only the NVR server can see.

Can anyone share what precautions they have taken?

Thanks.

 

[nayr]

I have port authentication on my switch, if you unplug my cameras and try to use the network cable it'll put you on my public vlan (I run open wifi), with filtered internet and nothing else.. only way to get onto the security vlan is with proper credentials.

 

[nayr]

so my 12v PoE power splitter took a shit, started getting all sorts of packetloss from this camera.. thought perhaps cable was bad and I didnt test it well enough.. so I opened it up, cut the end off and put it back.. still had packet loss.

so I used a coupler and plugged my macbook pro in, without the splitter I transfered 10GB of data while pinging it continuously without as much as a dropped packet.

repeated the test, this time with the splitter in the way.. ~10% packet loss, fucking bullshit.

so I guess I'll be trying another brand, I wonder if the heat killed this.. Ive got another one for my trailer cam's mic.. going to steal it and test some more.

 

[pozzello]

contacts get crufty being outside, maybe? small wire brush...

 

[nayr]

nah contacts are fine, I was getting a ton of RX errors on my switch.. right now the splitter is removed and its going right into the camera, I am at >1k pings without a packet dropped or any port errors.

I live in a desert, takes some effort to make contacts oxidize.

 

[nayr]

ordered this splitter, seems to be better quality and supports GigE, hopefully it'll last the long haul: http://www.amazon.com/802-3af-Gigabit-Splitter-Ethernet-Switches/dp/B017J8WJ5E

I cant recommend the iCreatin 12v Splitter, unreliable junk.. on the bench now its completely non functional, wont power up or do shit.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

ordered this splitter, seems to be better quality and supports GigE, hopefully it'll last the long haul: http://www.amazon.com/802-3af-Gigabit-Splitter-Ethernet-Switches/dp/B017J8WJ5E

I cant recommend the iCreatin 12v Splitter, unreliable junk.. on the bench now its completely non functional, wont power up or do shit.

You were working that one fairly hard though. Didn't you have the illuminator, camera and mic all running off the same splitter? The illuminator alone is 10W and the camera is up to 6.5W. You may have asked a bit much of a 1A splitter. If you had it in the bird house with the illuminator and the camera it was probably toasty warm at the best of times too. Overcurrent and heat are bad for electrics. Have you considered running POE+ out there so you have 2A to play with instead of 1? Maybe get it ouside the bird house or even heatsink it? Having a splitter that is only working to 75% of it's capacity wont hurt it's life either.