Dedicated License Plate Cam project

[bigbadw]

nayr, pozzello, thanks for the help on this. At times I feel embarrassed thinking I should be able to figure these things out, but your knowledge sure cuts down on my time-to-solution! I will do that tonight on the IR Light and get it focused down! (I left the ladder up against the tree, so once it gets dark I can gain easy access).
All of this is going to make the second camera a breeze to get up and running! All I'm waiting for is that "slow boat from China" delivery service for the second IR light.

 

[bigbadw]

with focused 850nm lights at night, if I hold my hand in front of the lens I can dimly see the projected light pattern. Definitely more awkward if you need the hand to hold onto the tree though. I had a camera creatively positioned in a tree for awhile but abandoned that location due to higher maintenance (my homebrew construction wasn't entirely waterproof and the view was affected by spiders, squirrels etc.)

Thanks cam235. Great points about the tree location. So far this one has worked well for me. (I'm lucky so far, I think). Also, I used multiple paint colors to camouflage the outside of the camera, so you really don't notice it up there. The location is perfect for oncoming traffic!

 

[pozzello]

tree-cam, eh? i'd love to see pix of that installation and hear how it works out in the long run, wrt critters & falling leaves, etc...

but as Nayr indicates, the best way to aim the cam & light is to have some sort of remote view (on your phone or tablet) as you
tweak things. adjust the camera aim during the day (when you can see stuff), and adjust the IR at night (duh)

 

[bigbadw]

tree-cam, eh? i'd love to see pix of that installation and hear how it works out in the long run, wrt critters & falling leaves, etc...

but as Nayr indicates, the best way to aim the cam & light is to have some sort of remote view (on your phone or tablet) as you
tweak things. adjust the camera aim during the day (when you can see stuff), and adjust the IR at night (duh)

Its been installed for quite a while now. Only able to capture daytime License Plates until now. I ran RJ45 (POE) to it, under a walkway and under the front yard through a conduit. I then sealed both ends of the conduit with silicone, for good measure. I'll grab some photos of it tomorrow.

 

[bigbadw]

Holy crap on a shingle! Look at the license plate clarity I am capturing now... (thanks for the directions on how to dial in that adjustable IR beam).

 

[nayr]

great work.. congrats

 

[bigbadw]

tree-cam, eh? i'd love to see pix of that installation and hear how it works out in the long run, wrt critters & falling leaves, etc...

but as Nayr indicates, the best way to aim the cam & light is to have some sort of remote view (on your phone or tablet) as you
tweak things. adjust the camera aim during the day (when you can see stuff), and adjust the IR at night (duh)

I'll do my best to upload "understandable" photos of the tree camera.
I am uploading; two different closeups of the camera. Remember, it is painted with camouflage, so it doesn't actually stand out very well. Then, a few different angles showing the tree and where the camera is located.
Then, I added the street direction view for the Tree Camera.

 

[bigbadw]

The last two photos (it looks like they got added as "attached thumbnails") are my "other direction", Bird House camera. I am waiting for the other IR Illuminator to arrive to turn that into a night time License Plate Capture camera as well.

 

[cam235]

@bigbadw : nice job with that tree camera install, I doubt anyone would notice that without looking for it. My biggest tree-cam problem was the home-made enclosure out of wire mesh, fabric and pieces of tree bark. It looked nice but wasn't fully waterproof. If you're using a regular outdoor enclosure, and it's mounted well enough that weather and wildlife activity doesn't dislodge it, I guess it will last awhile. Assuming you don't get a lightning strike!

By the way, I finally mounted the focusing 4-watt illuminator I mentioned on nayr's thread here: https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/13943-IR-Cannon-w-Adjustable-Focus?p=132385&viewfull=1#post132385
This model is lower power than the one nayr is using, but it is still enough for good plate visibility at 150 feet or more when fully focused. From the rear, when the brake lights weren't on bright, I was able to read digits by eye out to 300 feet. This is with Dahua IPC-HF5421E 4MP box cam at 1/250 shutter, gain 0~25, lens is Theia auto-iris 9-40mm zoom at 40 mm. It's looking straight down the street so there is almost no motion blur; I could get away with longer shutter except for the glare from the taillights / headlights. I guess having the higher elevation in the tree is good to get away from the peak headlight glare.

 

[bigbadw]

cam235, thank you for the review of tree LPC installation. Do you have any concerns with vandalism of your camera equipment? This appears to be a target in our area recently. The resale of stolen security cameras must be becoming a thing around here.

Anybody else seeing problems like that? Have you determined a way to make it tougher on the crooks?

 

[nayr]

typically when a residental surveillance system is vandalized or stolen its a disgruntled neighbor and not an opportunistic prowler..

though I do recall one capture where someone stole a turret watching a dumpster; I suspect they either had plans on disposing of something in that dumpster; or they were homeless and wanted a place to sleep, then the voices in there head told em the government was using that camera to track em.. so it could just be some crazy person wearing a foil hat.. Thats more likely than a black market on stolen security cameras forming.

 

[bigbadw]

typically when a residental surveillance system is vandalized or stolen its a disgruntled neighbor and not an opportunistic prowler..

though I do recall one capture where someone stole a turret watching a dumpster; I suspect they either had plans on disposing of something in that dumpster; or they were homeless and wanted a place to sleep, then the voices in there head told em the government was using that camera to track em.. so it could just be some crazy person wearing a foil hat.. Thats more likely than a black market on stolen security cameras forming.

That would be good news! (if it is only the rare vandilsm vs. a quick theft). Thank you for the reply nayr!

 

[cam235]

Quite a few people on my street have cameras, usually right over the garage door watching the driveway. I have not heard of cameras being targeted in my area, but just as a precaution I try not to draw attention to mine. If your network cable is accessible, also possible someone might try to hack into your home network from it. Nayr mentioned having his cameras on a separate, isolated network.

 

[bigbadw]

Quite a few people on my street have cameras, usually right over the garage door watching the driveway. I have not heard of cameras being targeted in my area, but just as a precaution I try not to draw attention to mine. If your network cable is accessible, also possible someone might try to hack into your home network from it. Nayr mentioned having his cameras on a separate, isolated network.

cam235, thank you for passing on those comments and design ideas (and credit to nayr). I do try to think through the design aspects as much as possible. So, I'm running 12 cameras off of a home built, dedicated PC with two networks. One network is our general network, and the other network is dedicated to the cameras ( on a .100) IP network. This secondary network runs out to the garage to a 24 port POE switch and all cameras are hardwired. When we go on vacation, I add a couple of wireless cameras to the interior, just in case a burglary did occur. The physical hard drives are located 6 feet away from the Security PC, connected by eSata cables, behind a "hidden" panel. The concept is, if someone did break in, grab the Security PC, they would not have time to figure out and locate the actual hard drives (HD) with all of the images/video on it. Two additional hard drives have been added to make a total of 4. One, for the OS, the second HD is the main storage for the Blue Iris image/video. The newest two drives were to alleviate any bottleneck from the read/write functions caused by the increase in License Plate Capture video. (I was getting times when the video capture was inconsistent. Three cameras are triggered together when a vehicle approaches for either direction, so a lot of video was heading toward the same disk drive). Time will tell if this resolves my issue or not.

The idea that started the question about "camera as a target for theft" was a recent robbery of school nearby. They targeted the security cameras. It sure is starting to sound like vandalism vs a quick cash crop for bad guys, based on responses from you folks. That is good news!

 

[cam235]

I was thinking of putting some NAS drives in a hidden vault. Annoying when they eventually fail and need to be replaced, though.

On ALPR the default setup is to downscale to 1280x720. With plates around 200' away, reads are more reliable if I do not downsample my 4 MPix image, but then processing takes a long time. The Theia 9-40mm was the best "5 Mpixel" IR-compensated lens I could find; the longer lenses seem to be intended for lower-res cameras, or are crazy expensive. I think I will need to spend some time with Python to crop the frame before passing to alpr. Maybe I can improve process time enough with just using a mask image, we will see.

 

[nayr]

this is why i got a cuda card to offload; went from 200ms (5fps) to like 60ms (20fps) on 4Ghz Phenom2

 

[bigbadw]

this is why i got a cuda card to offload; went from 200ms (5fps) to like 60ms (20fps) on 4Ghz Phenom2

nayr, after I start my experiment with adding the two hard drives, dedicated to the License Plate Capture, I'll see if there are any other bottlenecks going on. I keep a watch on BlueIris and the CPU utilization. Currently I am running at 56% CPU. If it increases with the addition of my next License Plate camera (still waiting for the IR illuminator on the slow boat from China) to face the opposite way, I will look into the CUDA card! Thanks for that! (I didn't actually realize I could solve the CPU problem!)

 

[bigbadw]

The current issue I am struggling with is capturing legible license plates right after dawn (about 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how gloomy the weather is), and just before dusk. Current times here are: 7:56am (dawn) and 5:49pm (dusk). Here are pictures from this morning showing that transition.
I have the day/night schedule set to 8:00am start day config, 5:00pm start night config. I've played around with overlapping each by 30 minutes, it did not help.

 

[bigbadw]

Here are the Dusk pictures. I show the unreadable license plates while the camera is in Day configuration, prior to 5:30pm (sunset in my timezone).
Then, after 5:30, when the camera turns on Night configuration, still unreadable.
(note: by 5:55pm, the license plates become readable.)
(note 2: I changed night configuration to start at 5:30pm)

 

[nayr]

i switch to black and white long before this.. the lpr camera is switching to B&W at least half an hour before sunset and holds onto it the same ammount after sunrise.