How to record location data on mobile LPR?

A

allthis

n3wb
May 24, 2022
1
1
Rhode Island
Hello,

My question concerns setting up a mobile (vehicle-mounted) LPR system. I’m curious if anyone could share some insight on a simple way to record location data with plate reads on a mobile system running Openalpr. My setup is just an inexpensive Dahua IP camera connected to a laptop running Rekor Scout on Windows. I’m having no trouble getting good reads so I have the camera part all figured out. I just don’t have any idea how to integrate location data. Pardon my ignorance as I have no coding experience. If I bought a usb gps puck would there be a way to get it to record the location of plate reads? Or is there some simpler way of doing it I haven’t considered? I would be grateful if any of the fine people on this forum would be able to point me in the right direction. Thank you!
 
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Not clear how often you need to acquire GPS data, but in Google Maps on your mobile device, you can long-press on a map location, and then click on the "Share" icon, and then select the "Copy to Clipboard" option. Then paste it into an email you are composing or a OneNote, etc. It will only give you a URL for later navigating to the location in Google Maps later, though.

I also see that Google Maps will show the latitude and longitude of any selected location.

Okay, if you need only the lat/long, then in Google Maps, drop a pin, tap it, and in the area where you see the lat/long, tap it, and it gets copied to your clipboard.
 
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Since you indicate the LPR is mobile, it makes me think you are wanting to drive around and record a lot of plates along a street, and somehow tag each collected plate with its location, all automatically and quickly. The police can do this sort of data collection from their cruisers. Your problem first off is that OpenAPLR is a closed system, not able to accept external meta data such as locations, and have it stored in its database.
 
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Another idea is to have a second wide angle camera to record the terrain as you drive around. There will be timestamps on the wider spotter camera's stream which you could correlate to the LPR capture's embedded timestamp. It would at least allow you to investigate locations afterwards, although nothing would tag locations automatically.
 
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A better idea, although I am unfamiliar with the process, but there's a feature within BlueIris to embed data such as the humidity, temperature, etc., from some external WAN weather source, onto the captured images. The need would be to find a way to get the lat/long coordinates from either the PC itself or from some GPS unit attached to the PC, and then learn how that BlueIris API call needs to be configured. Then each image which OpenALPR stores would have the location data embedded into the image itself.
 
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I see this Google Play app: "Realtime Location API" although I am unsure how it would work with BlueIris . . . it purports to post location data to a server of your choice and at quick intervals . . .

play.google.com

Realtime Location API - Alarm - Apps on Google Play

Real-time location sharing and location alarm device.
play.google.com play.google.com
 
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Please check out this article from OpenALPR, where they describe how to include mobile GPS coordinates:

How to add GPS coordinates?

You can either set a permanent value or update the GPS coordinates while the agent is running
help.rekor.ai help.rekor.ai
 
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allthis said:
Hello,

My question concerns setting up a mobile (vehicle-mounted) LPR system. I’m curious if anyone could share some insight on a simple way to record location data with plate reads on a mobile system running Openalpr. My setup is just an inexpensive Dahua IP camera connected to a laptop running Rekor Scout on Windows. I’m having no trouble getting good reads so I have the camera part all figured out. I just don’t have any idea how to integrate location data. Pardon my ignorance as I have no coding experience. If I bought a usb gps puck would there be a way to get it to record the location of plate reads? Or is there some simpler way of doing it I haven’t considered? I would be grateful if any of the fine people on this forum would be able to point me in the right direction. Thank you!
Click to expand...

Would you be able to post some photos of your mobile setup?
 
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