Is Rekor Scout still the best option?

IReallyLikePizza2

IReallyLikePizza2

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May 14, 2019
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Been using Rekor Scout for a while, and we've endured a lot of price increases. I'm currently paying $20/mo which is quite a lot.

Only reason I keep using it is because of @mlapaglia and the Web Hook Processor, if that didn't exist, I would have cancelled it by now

Is there any viable alternatives to Rekor Scout? I'd love to start looking before the inevitable next price increase comes
 
That is it cost-wise unless you use the free ANPR CodeProject within BI.
 
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I'm using the Plate Recognizer service, but we're on a cul-de-sac with fewer than 2500 plates run per month so I'm able to use the free tier.

If you're also under that many, consider it.
 
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I had 472 yesterday, so I'm going to say its a no-go

I guess it was really closer to 300~ since every car with front and back plates gets counted twice
 
I've been using Rekor Scout for a few years. The original developer of OpenALPR (Matt Hill) left Rekor last year, and seems to be semi-retired and working on open source projects. Despite that, Rekor has been upgrading Scout. The latest client (4.1.7) definitely has improved accuracy, especially with TN plates. I've been conversing with their support group, and they're promising some additional upgrades to support Ubuntu 22.04 in the next few months.

The price increases are annoying, but I've yet to find a competing product that allows me to record several thousand plates at a flat rate per camera, and with the same accuracy as Scout. I'll continue to stick with it.
 
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i reverse engineered the license checks in the rekor scout DLLs to make it work without a valid license. idk if i would be allowed to upload them here.
 
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mlapaglia said:
i reverse engineered the license checks in the rekor scout DLLs to make it work without a valid license. idk if i would be allowed to upload them here.
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You may fool the agent into working on a PC, but the agent uploads license and thumbnail metadata from your cameras into Rekor's servers. They would know in an instant if you have an unauthorized camera running.

Of course, you could run your own web server and point your agent at that server, but do you want to bet that there isn't some other "phone home" checking going on between the agent and Rekor?
 
wtimothyholman said:
You may fool the agent into working on a PC, but the agent uploads license and thumbnail metadata from your cameras into Rekor's servers. They would know in an instant if you have an unauthorized camera running.

Of course, you could run your own web server and point your agent at that server, but do you want to bet that there isn't some other "phone home" checking going on between the agent and Rekor?
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But he has been running it that way for years?
 
Well its been another year, and paying $20/month along with their billing shenanigans is getting old again

Still no real viable option yet?
 
I’m paying for rekor for my one camera which point parallel to my road. I have BI+CodeProject license plate checker. It only catches a fraction of the plates the Rekor does. It’s reasonably well for cars which pull into my driveway. With three cameras, it’ll usually recognize plates from one of them. I use this to trigger home automation, such as when the house cleaners arrive.

Recently, my BI system went offline for a few weeks when Microsoft decided to upgrade me to Windows 11. I’m thinking about giving up BI and switching to UniFi. The adverts make it look like thr LPR performance is as good as rekor. Does anyone have a comparison or have done this migration?
 
MikeLud1 said:
Can you post a full resolution image of one of the misses so I can see what is causing the miss.
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I’m happy to send some examples. I think though the main difference is how BI captures and sends to CO. My LPR camera supports three streams. With Rekor I have it processing the 1080 stream. Second, I think BI only processes key frames. I’m pretty sure Rekor is processing more or all of the iframes. Lastly, I’m not sure how BI does the actual LPR. I’d expect it runs the plate detector over the frame and then sends the cropped portion for OCR.

With my home automation, I run a vehicle detector on a 4K image, and then crop the vehicle and send the cropped image to CP. this seems to be more reliable than listening to events from BI doing its own LPR.

Where do you want me to send examples?
 
brianegge said:
Recently, my BI system went offline for a few weeks when Microsoft decided to upgrade me to Windows 11. I’m thinking about giving up BI and switching to UniFi. The adverts make it look like thr LPR performance is as good as rekor. Does anyone have a comparison or have done this migration?
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I've looked at the UniFi AI LPR camera, and at this point I wouldn't personally consider it a replacement for a good varifocal camera running Rekor Scout. The optical zoom is only 3X, and I suspect that the IR illumination is at 850 nm, which means the camera will miss a lot of 3M and paper license plates at night. The UniFi camera seems intended to be set up directly next to (or over) a road, not 50 to 100 feet away as you'd want with most residential installations.

I'd love to find a replacement for Rekor Scout, but I have to yet to find anything that competes in terms of price and performance. My main concern is that Rekor is either going to go out of business, or else raise prices to the point where Scout will be unaffordable. The nearby city of Mt. Juliet, TN recently dropped Rekor in favor of Flock Safety, which is not a good sign.
 
brianegge said:
I’m happy to send some examples. I think though the main difference is how BI captures and sends to CO. My LPR camera supports three streams. With Rekor I have it processing the 1080 stream. Second, I think BI only processes key frames. I’m pretty sure Rekor is processing more or all of the iframes. Lastly, I’m not sure how BI does the actual LPR. I’d expect it runs the plate detector over the frame and then sends the cropped portion for OCR.

With my home automation, I run a vehicle detector on a 4K image, and then crop the vehicle and send the cropped image to CP. this seems to be more reliable than listening to events from BI doing its own LPR.

Where do you want me to send examples?
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You can DM me the examples. The issue you are having might be the way you have your camera, trigger, and AI setup. I have my camera set to to 20 fps and the AI analyze one image each set to 50ms. With the below AI setting CP.AI will analyze every frame and BI will alert on the image with the highest confidence.

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Using your settings improved things quite a bit! I think I was only doing ALPR on confirmed vehicle alerts, which didn't work at night, and I didn't have my images each 50ms.

I also found I was not finding plates because BI is saving the space between the second and third digit, while Rekor is not. I can't find any fuzzy search feature in BI. I must still not have something setup correctly as I'm getting Red X on the correct plates.
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brianegge said:
Using your settings improved things quite a bit! I think I was only doing ALPR on confirmed vehicle alerts, which didn't work at night, and I didn't have my images each 50ms.

I also found I was not finding plates because BI is saving the space between the second and third digit, while Rekor is not. I can't find any fuzzy search feature in BI. I must still not have something setup correctly as I'm getting Red X on the correct plates.
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You can set the ALPR module to remove spaces

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