Dedicated License Plate Cam project

[spencnor]

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.

+1. The NEC, National Electrical Code, here in the U.S., specifies that an electrical circuit shall not be loaded to more than 80% if the circuit has continuous use (>3 hours). A 1 amp splitter has a capacity of 12 watts. I'm not sure if it's 12 watts continuous rated though. I agree, a 2 amp splitter would be best - not as much heat loading.

 

[nayr]

according to my PoE Midspan, I was within the 1.5A rating of the iCreatin.. only pulling about 1A/12W

Ive got a new midspan coming with PoE+ and GigE.. these are more of a voltage regulator than a power supply, a high duty cycle should not really be much of an issue imho.

 

[Sabot]

Greeting all,
I really would like to achieve plate reads. I have a DS-2CD2032-I w/ 12mm lens. The camera is located 140 feet from a stop sign @ 23 degree angle, 8 feet off the ground. I just moved the camera into it's current location and I have yet to spend too much time on the settings both in Blue Iris and the camera itself. Currently, the view of the plate is not readable. Is the distance just too great for my camera? Using the IPVM tool, looks like it's not the right camera for the job. Set the camera settings back to high resolution and daylight images did improve. Any suggested settings? Other camera suggestions?







Improved...


Many thanks!

 

[nayr]

yeah that camera is never going to reach that far, im reading @ 140ft, with 60mm optics massive amount of IR at night.

 

[Kawboy12R]

@Sabot That camera can have a 25mm lens shoehorned in if you don't mind disassembling it.

 

[Sabot]

I am open to the new lens since I purchased this camera for testing.

 

[nayr]

i think poz is running that cam with a 25mm, but not that distance.. i think he has posted a few captures to let you know what your can expect.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

according to my PoE Midspan, I was within the 1.5A rating of the iCreatin.. only pulling about 1A/12W

Somone was pulling your leg if they told you the iCreatin splitter had a 12V 1.5A supply rating. 12V @1.5A is 18W. The IEEE 802.3af standard is 15.4W at the source. Factor in transmission/conversion losses and it was never going to happen. 12V@1A = 12W is about the best you can hope for, and that figure can be as low as 10.4W depending on the length of your cable and efficiency of your splitter. I prefer not to run chinese electrics past about 80% in any continuous duty cycle to avoid the smoke escaping, because as every good sparky knows, all electical devices are powered by smoke. If they weren't then why do they stop working when the smoke escapes?

Once a day at least your setup tried to pull down north of 16.5W because your illuminator comes on, your back focus changes, and your IR cutout all switches on command from your home automation system. that spike was followed by 8-12 hours of continuous duty at 12W up against a toasty illuminator.

Ive got a new midspan coming with PoE+ and GigE.. these are more of a voltage regulator than a power supply, a high duty cycle should not really be much of an issue imho.

With a 2A PoE+ Spliter I think you will be on a winner there. Once a day at least your setup will try to pull down north of 16.5W because your illuminator comes on, your back focus changes, and your IR cutout all switches on the same command from your home automation system. Presently that spike is followed by 8-12 hours of 100% continuous duty up against a toasty illuminator. A 2A splitter will easily supply the momentary demand of switching and then be at 50% continuous duty.

Quick question about the midspans. Did you go that route because you already had good switches and basically needed to throw in power? Do you see any benefit to going for a seperate switch and a midspan over just a POE switch where the switch needs upgrading anyway?

 

[nayr]

IEEE 802.3af standard is 15.4W MINIMUM, my current PoE midspan can overdrive them to 17W, as per its specifications.. the new one can do 35W and PoE+ is merely 25W

From the Splitter's Spec Sheet:

Input: 36-54VDC max ; Shielded RJ-45 female;
Output: 12VDC max 1.5A

80% Duty of 1.5A is 14.4W, and I am under that.. the maximum ive seen out my midspan was 14.2W if I reboot it with IR on.. never came close to 16W, I have power meetering on my midspan.

the lua scripts are fired off sequentially, and not at the same time.. I have it now switching to BW an hour before sunset, and the IR comes on and focus changes at sunset..

All the 2A Splitters had junk reviews or cost a fucking fortune.. and this IR light does not consume the amount of power it claims, shrug.. I have another iCreation in it right now I stole out of another camera.. and its back to working fine, for now.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

All the 2A Splitters had junk reviews or cost a fucking fortune..

With some luck that will start to come down as POE+ becomes more of a standard. They are about $50 for 10/100 locally. 1A ones are about $10.

 

[chalk4]

Calibrating Masks, this is what I've been doing.. seems to work pretty well, if anyone has a better strategy I am open to alternatives and/or improvements.

you need sample imagery to build your mask.. rip some captures out of your recordings with vehicles in position where you want them captured or run openalprd basically default expecting it to miss stuff but still get you alot of imagery to work with after enough time..
look for:

• Biggest Plate & Smallest Plate, due to distance and angles.. if your capturing both coming and going you need them for both all lined up in roughly the same vertical plane.
• Highest Plate and Lowest Plate, big trucks and lil cars.. the extreme edges.
• No plate image, an image with no vehicles or plates to read.. this is your baseline.

Import all the images into gimp/photoshop as separate layers, put your no plate image as the lowest/background layer and go through and cut everything but the plate area out of all the other layers, leaving the plates in the original location minus the vehicle..

you should now have the big and small plates both coming and going all transposed on-top of each-other, change layer visibility as desired, take your biggest plate size, calculate the width in pixels and add a guide line the same pixels to both the left and right of your plate group.. take your highest plate read and add a guide with a small margin of error, same with your lowest plate read.. you should now have your first mask defined.. this will get refined but its a great starting point.

create a white layer, with a black layer on top and push them to the top.. select the area inside your guides and cut out that section of the black layer, you should now have a black and white mask you can export to a jpeg and put in your openalpr.conf

play with the max_plate_width_percent & max_plate_height_percent options in openalpr.conf with your largest plate capture, get those numbers as small as reasonable while still detecting your plate then add a few percentage for a margin of error, thats unlikely to really be the absolute largest plate you have.

run your no-plate capture through openalprd after you have the above options tuned, take the total processing time on divide it by 1000, round the results down and this is your starting FPS.. so ~200ms would be 5fps, ~100ms would be 10fps, etc.. the smaller we get our mask the higher the FPS we can run.. the higher the FPS we can run the smaller our mask can be.. somewhere is perfection, and with all the variables changing you can just tune it in w/trial and error.. you'll get the feel pretty quickly if you made things better or worse.

fire up openalprd and wait for traffic!

3 options will likely play out:
1. Too much capture, your getting a half dozen plate captures for each vehicle.. so we can shrink our width down on mask incrementally and retry until we get desired # of images on average, and at least one capture for even the fastest speeders.
2. Just enough capture, you nailed it... just keep testing and make sure nothing slips past your mask.
3. Missing captures, your mask it too small and you dont have the performance for the FPS needed to get everyone in that area.. so try: expand the width, lower the fps, back off the resolution, increase zoom.

Where in the config do you specify the jpeg for the mask?

Never mind I see there is a new config file that did have the info I was looking for.

 

[pozzello]

@Sabot, yes, one can shoehorn a 25mm lens into a hik bullet May be worth a try, since you've already got the cam,
but I don't think that's going to be enough zoom for 140ft. I used one briefly at ~50 ft and 25mm is OK for that.

original 25mm hack thread:
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/740-25mm-Lens-for-ds-2cd2032-i-Mini-Bullet
25mm lens available here:
http://wrightwoodsurveillance.com/product/25mm-lens-fits-ds-2cd2032-i-bullet/

another setup similar to yours:
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/11133-Another-License-plate-capture-project

I currently use a couple Huisun/Imporx 10x PTZ's (5-50mm) zoom, and i'd say these are good out to maybe 75-80 feet,
although others have shown decent shots out past that.

 

[Sabot]

I ordered one lens from Wright but it's on B/O. No idea when it will arrive. Figured I try it for $17 and see how it goes. I will also move it to closer location to see how it works. I never thought about using these cameras for this task but this one is my extra and why not give it a shot. Thank you for you help!

 

[chalk4]

Has anyone checked out the new version of Openalpr? They have revamped the webpage and allow for the detection mask to be configured on the fly.

 

[Sabot]

Just received and installed the Wright's lens. Nice improvement over the 12mm. Very easy upgrade. Hardest part is the focus, that being holding the camera in two halves while focusing and looking at the screen. Even that was easy. Took less then thirty minutes to complete. Well worth the $17 IMHO.

 

[GBot]

Hey nayr, I think I linked all of the components of your setup below. Can you comment on how it's going for you so far? Did you ever try an Nvidia card to ease the workload on your cpu? Have you compiled OpenALPR in a way that a Windows user with no programming experience could run, or is a high level of coding skill necessary to set it up?

Basically, can I copy you, or is it a lot more complex than I realize?

Thanks, man.

lens
light
cam

 

[tangent]

Hey nayr, I think I linked all of the components of your setup below. Can you comment on how it's going for you so far? Did you ever try an Nvidia card to ease the workload on your cpu? Have you compiled OpenALPR in a way that a Windows user with no programming experience could run, or is a high level of coding skill necessary to set it up?

Basically, can I copy you, or is it a lot more complex than I realize?

Thanks, man.

lens
light
cam

If you go back a few pages you'll find your answer. To use it on windows just use one of the pre compiled releases: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr/releases
I'm not 100% sure if these build have gpu support built in or not, but I think they do. You could also use their cloud service but it's expensive @ $50/cam/mo

nayr doesn't use windows.

yeah I had to rebuild everything, specifically I had to install Nvidia's Binary Installer and Cuda toolkit, then build the latest version of OpenCL w/Cuda enabled, then rebuild openalpr again from scratch.. I am running on bare metal now, this sucked pretty hard even on a really good vm server.

full color in the daytime, still doing realtime 20fps @ 4MP w/Mask

Thu May 19 15:04:04 2016       
+------------------------------------------------------+                       
| NVIDIA-SMI 352.39     Driver Version: 352.39         |                       
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 950     Off  | 0000:01:00.0     Off |                  N/A |
| 38%   45C    P0    30W / 141W |     54MiB /  2047MiB |     26%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID  Type  Process name                               Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0     23612    C   alprd                                           43MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

 

[GBot]

If you go back a few pages you'll find your answer. To use it on windows just use one of the pre compiled releases: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr/releases
I'm not 100% sure if these build have gpu support built in or not, but I think they do. You could also use their cloud service but it's expensive @ $50/cam/mo

nayr doesn't use windows.

Ok, thanks for the reply. I guess I could play around with the precompiled release for Windows and see if I can get it working with my existing cams, then may get a new cam later just for license plates. Now all I need is so free time...

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

[SyconsciousAu]

nayr doesn't use windows.

I suspect that is a dirty word in Nayrs house.

 

[GBot]

I suspect that is a dirty word in Nayrs house.

Lol, point taken.

Not saying he uses Windows, just asking whether I may be able to stand on his giant shoulders and achieve similar results. I believe that's what many people here are hoping to do

I wont ask any more noob questions until I've had a chance to get my hands dirty. Thanks for the replies!

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk