help with OpenALPR on Windows

Andrew F

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Hey guys,

I'd like to add ALPR to my Blue Iris setup, and I'm honestly not sure how...

I'm testing the new Plate Recognizer integration (seems to work well!), but our street is WAY too busy for the free plan to be possible. So I think I need to setup OpenALPR.

Is there a post or tutorial somewhere that shows how to set this up to work with Blue Iris? I just don't understand how to get it all talking to each other.

I think my Blue Iris server might be an issue. It's just a 32-bit Windows 10 box, and it appears that OpenALPR requires 64-bit?

I can manually use alpr.exe to process a sample image, but that's as far as I'm getting.

Help?

Thanks!
Andrew
 

pinko

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Is your computer hardware 32bit or just the OS?
VM and docker options are still available.
 
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Andrew F

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There is no integration between Blue Iris and OpenALPR like there is with Plate Recognizer. @Gymratz and @DLONG2 created the OpenALPR Tool to allow for downloading and coalition of plate data from the OpenALPR Cloud service. Check out this post: OpenALPR Tool - Save and Query CSV Exports
Thank you! Yes, I know OpenALPR doesn't integrate directly within Blue Iris. But I can't figure out how to even run OpenALPR on my camera's video stream.

Is your computer hardware 32bit or just the OS?
VM and docker options are still available.
Ijust checked, and apparently I do have a 64-bit processor, just the 32-bit version of Windows 10. Should I try to change my Windows installation to 64-bit, or do you think there is another route that's easier / more efficient? (I'm fairly tech-savvy, but I'm never done much with virtual machines.)
 

Fubduck

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I use 2 - Dahua HFW5231E-Z12E's for my LPR cameras. I setup substream 2 in the cameras for feeding OpenALPR @ 1280x720 30fps. The main stream feeds Blue Iris @ 1920x1080 15fps. I used VLC to get the correct stream string.
In the OpenALPR application this is how I have my cameras configured:

IP Camera (Manual)
rtsp://login : password@10.0.0.xxx:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=2

You don't mention what camera(s) you have so that string may be very different for you.
 

Andrew F

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I use 2 - Dahua HFW5231E-Z12E's for my LPR cameras.
Same here, so your post is spot on! Thanks!

I'm currently in the process of upgrading my Windows install to 64 bit. Then hopefully Open ALPR will install much more smoothly. I'll post back how it goes...
 

mech

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Also have a look at your system's memory usage, versus how much RAM it has installed. If it needs more RAM, that's a cheap upgrade and your 64-bit Windows will put it to work. In my case I have two systems, one for LPR and one for BI, which are using about 4GB and 15GB respectively, out of 8GB and 32GB installed RAM.

OpenALPR can also offload some of the processing to nVidia cards. A cheap Quadro P620 won't stress out a power supply too badly or drive your power bill up a lot. If your system starts to run out of CPU power, consider slapping in a low-power nVidia card and following OpenALPR's config instructions to offload the plate processing to it, as detailed here: OpenALPR Watchman — openalpr 2.7.101 documentation (scroll down to the Windows 10 header where they talk about how to enable nVidia acceleration). My LPR box is a Core i5 with a nVidia card. It's keeping up with a 30fps stream at 5MP, at about 50% CPU usage and 10% GPU usage; without the nVidia card, that would be far beyond what the i5 could do alone.

The 5MP resolution is excessive for simply monitoring two lanes, my 720P camera could do that brilliantly... but the 5MP resolution is high enough to actually hit cross-traffic under best-case conditions, reading plates at an angle of attack approaching 70 degrees off-axis.
 

Andrew F

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Thanks everyone!

I now have OpenALPR up and running. For the next person who's having trouble, here's what I did:
  1. Upgraded my Windows install from 32-bit to 64-bit. Many tutorials online for this step, such as this one. (I got an error when I first tried to install the new version. I had to disconnect my secondary HD for the install to work.)
  2. Reinstalled Blue Iris 5 and imported my config.
  3. Downloaded the OpenALPR Watchman from here.
  4. Installed it, and just followed the directions from there.
  5. The link from Fubduck above was super close to mine, but I had to specify subtype "1". I figured that out via trial and error:
    1. rtsp://login : password@10.0.0.xxx/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1
Thank you! Now I gotta go figure out how to download the data using the OpenALPR Tool, but hopefully that will be simple.
 
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