Do you really need a IP camera with LPR to do LPR?

showlow

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Or can a NVR with LPR be enough?
 
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wittaj

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Be more specific?

Are you looking at taking a camera and tweaking settings to be able to visibly read the plates but the system cannot log the actual plate numbers or are you meaning a camera that can read the plates and log the plate and store the plate information?

If you have a NVR that can read and log plates, that is one that has ANPR, but you also need a camera that has ANPR for it to work.

If you are looking at taking a camera that you can tweak the settings to be able to visibly read a plate but cannot do anything about it like log and store it, then a third party solution to log and store the plates is needed like OpenALPR or Plate Recognizer.

Or you can go with an analog system as well that is capable of reading and logging plates.

Regardless of the answer, the camera still has to be tweaked for LPR duty and as such, it cannot do double duty like be an overview camera and read plates. Maybe in the daytime you can get away with it, but not at night with the shutter speeds needed to read plates unless you have a crazy ton of light like the toll booth cameras with plate readers.
 
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Or can a NVR with LPR be enough?
I am fairly certain that for an NVR to be able to use it's built in ANPR options, it needs an ANPR camera feeding it.

@bigredfish may know for sure, also maybe @coney27 and see his thread:

also check out

 

bigredfish

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Pretty sure it can be done on an NVR with ANPR and a “non LPR” camera
 

showlow

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Thank you everyone for replying.

We are doing a fresh surveillance video install at a small industrial park. It has entrance on the east wall and exit on the west wall.

While doing research on what IP camera, NVR and HDD to get I saw NVRs and IP cameras with License-plate recognition (LPR) and Automatic number-plate recognition (APNR) features. This is useful to us as we'd want to know the exact & actual time a truck entered & exited our facility without any human intervention.

My question is do you really need to buy matching LPR/APNR NVR & IP cameras to get this feature to work or can it be done via Windows software?

Follow up question is would this also apply to facial recognition? Facial recognition is useful to us to ID people who did not register at the guard house and verify if the actual employee went to their workplace to avoid attendance fraud.
 

wittaj

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Some of the newer NVRs are capable of handling some AI type features without the camera being able to. But most will say you should match manufacturers regardless.

Facial recognition can work well in the right situations, and yours could be one. Too many try to use it at night to ID someone on their sidewalk by the street - not so good. I have dabbled with it a little and found it to be problematic in a home setting and many say it is a gimmick that doesn't work well. I certainly wouldn't use it at home with automation to unlock doors LOL.

But a well lit area where the person is close to the camera and face level to get a nice clean shot of the face and it can work fairly well.

Many people here use OpenALPR or Plate Recognizer to read and ID plates. That camera could be part of a NVR solution or stand alone. Both have the option to send a video feed to the platform and in that case a NVR wouldn't be required. You can view the results on a webpage. Both of those companies have a trial that you can run, so I would recommend trying them both and see which one you like better.
 
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