Need comments/critiques on my LPR proposal

T

TheGooginator

Getting the hang of it
Jun 26, 2020
92
71
California
Hello everyone,

I have come up with what I believe to be a location and where I would like to focus my LPR on to obtain plates easiest on cars entering and existing my Cul De Sac. This will be my first camera setup and using the IPC-HWF5241-Z12E sounds like the best option atm. I have another thread in the Cyber Security subforum explaining what I want to purchase. Please see the IPVM image below for my proposal. I also am attaching some nighttime footage of my terrible Nest cam to show the area I am looking to focus on with the LPR camera. This video footage is from a recent day at 3AM of a car I believe was searching for packages left on doorsteps. Looking for any critiques on location and if the hardware makese sense in my secnario.

LPR IPC-HWF5241-Z12E.jpg

View attachment Potential Thief.mp4
 
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At 130' head on you should not have a problem. Daytime will be fine. Realize that at night you will put the cam in B&W mode, have the IRs dialed up, and running a very fast shutter speed. The goal will be to get good contrast on the plate only. The car will be totally dark except for head/tail lights. Do not worry about the IPVM estimate for night. They are trying to balance face and plate. You will not be doing that. You will only be concerned with the plate. Remember that a cam used for LPR is dedicated for LPR only.

Test it on a test rig (as described in the Cliff Notes) BEFORE you mount it.

@bigredfish will give you great pointers on how to get good caps at night.
 
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That is some amazing footage @bigredfish your situation is almost identical to time I hope you don't mind if I bug you for your assistance if I can't dial in my settings quite right after I install.
 
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No worries, just give me a jingle
 
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So I finally purchased my equipment to get my LPR up and running and installed it over the weekend. Last night I ran it with some settings I thought would be good but the headlights were blowing out the license plate so I turned down the IR it was at max. I will try again tonight and report back with some short footage to get some pointers on the camera settings. Below is an image in the day time just to show the amount of zoom I have on the location I am trying to cover.

Also want to know your guys thoughts on doing color in the daytime and B/W in the night time I currently have it set to change in the camera settings.

FLPR.20200720_170830076_1.jpg
 
@TheGooginator - You need to run B/W and a shutter priority of manual 1/2,000 at night.

Use HLC at night - that will tone down the headlights - the IR had nothing to do with headlight washout - it is an incorrect setting somewhere.

You need all the IR so turn the back up. Your image at night should be a completely black picture - all you will see are head/tail lights and the plate at night.

Strongly suggest you use the sunrise/sunset utility someone made on this site so that you can get the focus at night - at that shutter speed you need to manually set the focus or it will hunt all night trying to autofocus on something it cannot see and then your plates will be blurry.

I would suggest zooming in tighter as well.

Maybe do a screenshot of the settings you used.
 
wittaj said:
@TheGooginator - You need to run B/W and a shutter priority of manual 1/2,000 at night.

Use HLC at night - that will tone down the headlights - the IR had nothing to do with that.

You need all the IR so turn the back up. Your image at night should be a completely black picture - all you will see are head/tail lights and the plate at night.

Strongly suggest you use the sunrise/sunset utility someone made on this site so that you can get the focus at night - at that shutter speed you need to manually set the focus or it will hunt all night trying to autofocus on something it cannot see and then your plates will be blurry.

I would suggest zooming in tighter as well.

Maybe do a screenshot of the settings you used.
Click to expand...

Thanks I just checked and my shutter is currently at 1/4000 with B/W on and HLC on at 60. My IR is currently set to ZoomPrio at 90 correction should I change the IR to manual?
 
Wow you got washout at that shutter speed? You must have gain or NR too high then? There are two manual shutter settings - you need the one that is shutter priority.

Can you post a pic of the night shot?
 
check out this thread it has a lot of helpful information.

LPR / Security Cam duty

So I am the first house in on a neighbourhood that has experienced some breakins lately. Most folks here have settled on Ring cameras being setup for whatever reason (a neighbour swears that there the best thing since sliced bread and insists all home owners to switch to them...but I digress)...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
Thanks guys let me run it again tonight and tomorrow I will post a quick video if someone drives through and provide my current settings with it. I really hope I don't have to purchase some additional IR modules but we will see.
 
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Oh man perfect location for LPR. What do you do about headlights totally washing out the plate ? I suppose mounting it high up will help and perhaps some kind of backlight like WDR option ?
 
So here is a short video of the same car around the same time but my video is worse now. See the settings I have below as well. One note I had wrong timezones in my camera so my camera went to B/W when it was almost dark outside so I wonder if this is a focus issue atm. Any comments would be appreciated.
Annotation 2020-07-21 065037.jpgAnnotation 2020-07-21 065038.jpgAnnotation 2020-07-21 065039.jpgAnnotation 2020-07-21 065040.jpg
View attachment FLPR.20200721_000000_1.mp4
 
I can’t see you video on pc or iPhone. Just a white background
 
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