@wrybread
Absolutely can pull great ALPR/ANPR from the 7xxx cams, that is one of their primary ways to shine. Setup, both in dialing in your FOV, image, lighting is critical though for ALPR/ANPR and more so than LPR/NPR as you need to give an environment in which the AI cam has enough time to a) detect a vehicle is the target on screen and then b) can auto detect the plates, vehicle details. You mention OpenALPR which is great but as I mentioned in my write up, you have to remember that OpenALPR is taking a stream and then has the advantage of applying Nvidia cloud based processing against it. Hence for those super hard to read plates (poor plate, challenging lighting) often times a 3rd party HW/SW AI platform will process slightly better as it has a) the luxury of not needing to do so in real-time (always a period of time after stream has been processed) and b) a huge amount of horsepower behind the processing.
With that said, the power of an ANPR/ALPR cam in conjunction with an NVR (5216 or higher for example) is the ability to build white/black lists and then trigger your security infrastructure against those. For example license plate 123 ABC is seen on 7xxx cam 1 and when it see’s it calls overview PTZ #2 to preset 1 where it is then waiting (at a choke point now) to intercept and track the vehicle identified. Other actions can be notifications in real-time when a specific vehicle or ‘type’ of vehicle moves through an area and you want it to capture + alert. In this second example think of an activity that has homeowners or LE looking for a blue car etc. All of this you get when combining an ANPR camera with an NVR hence the recommendation for using in conjunction as part of your security requirements. Add in Face Recognition cams and you then have truly powerful, on device, real-time capture solution (depending on your needs of course) that can tackle most needs BUT again need to be dialed in correctly.
That is why you’ll often see me recommend that depending on security needs (such as dark site where you cannot move streams off site) that you send your main stream to the NVR for processing and action as well as a sub-stream to OpenALPR or your tool of choice for secondary processing should you need it. Just remember these are 2 very different platforms. My recommendation if you had to choose 1 would be ANPR/ALPR + NVR.
I won't bore people and go into the other benefits of ANPR in conjunction with NVR such as metadata & tagged searches across cams etc as I already mentioned those in the post that
@bigredfish &
@EMPIRETECANDY linked back to earlier in this thread.
HTH. Take a look at my other posts in depth and if you need anything else feel free to DM me
