New member - my handle says it all

[Stop Illegal Dumping]

Hello,

New here. I'm a Public Works employee charged with placing cameras to catch illegal dumpers. I'm looking for creative ways to hide cameras to catch these bastidges in the act. We have access to pole cameras and may be able to place some on the electric company's poles. However, the height sometimes makes getting the license plates difficult because of the angle. Any ideas or success stories would be appreciated.

 

[Mark_M]

However, the height sometimes makes getting the license plates difficult because of the angle. Any ideas or success stories would be appreciated.

Are you attempting to use standard cameras to capture licence plates? That's probably your problem, have a look at LPR cameras (section of LPR on IPCT forums).

The camera doesn't have to automatically recognise, it could be as LPC (licence plate capture).
The main reason LPR/LPC camera get plates is:

• Proper focal length (optical zoom).
• As little motion blur as possible (correct CMOS sensor size ratio to resolution, a good example is Reolink have poor night vision because they use small imaging sensors in their cameras).
• HLC (high-light compensation) and other settings correct for night. This makes the image black and plates are readable. This is also compensating for head/tail lights of cars shining into the camera.

Aside from capturing a plate, maybe you could try object abandoned detection.
All the major CCTV brands have it, Dahua, Hikvision, Axis, Avigilion, etc. The idea it to set a region of the video and when the camera detects a new object for more than (e.g.) 30s it alerts it is abandoned.
Some Dahua/Hikvision cameras have built in sirens and lights that can go off. Axis has a seperate speaker/light device.

Maybe just if the camera detects a human and sounds a siren for a few seconds outside of business hours should be enough to deter illegal dumping.
(In this video I uploaded my own custom audio files).

 

[Stop Illegal Dumping]

We have access to the LPRs that LE uses, but those are almost exclusively on main roads which is not where people tend to dump. The other issue is that they capture so many vehicles that it literally takes forever to search through them and unfortunately, the AI they use is pretty limited so it requires sifting through a shit ton of pics. I may have to rethink the budget for this program and rejigger things to purchase a smaller number of units overall while adding in some LPRs of our own that use the manufacturers AI. Thanks a bunch. I'll check out that forum.

 

[Mark_M]

We have access to the LPRs that LE uses, but those are almost exclusively on main roads which is not where people tend to dump. The other issue is that they capture so many vehicles that it literally takes forever to search through them and unfortunately, the AI they use is pretty limited so it requires sifting through a shit ton of pics. I may have to rethink the budget for this program and rejigger things to purchase a smaller number of units overall while adding in some LPRs of our own that use the manufacturers AI. Thanks a bunch. I'll check out that forum.

Do the current licence plate cameras automatically recognise the plate number and put it into text?
Next.... can you link the licence number with the model/brand/color of the vehicle? (probably requires API access to your state's vehicle register).

If you have a camera which can capture color video during the night (aka a bright flood light in the dumping area) then you could search the LPR camera by color of vehicle.