OpenALPR Webhook Processor for IP Cameras

[biggen]

i bet the data is in there somewhere, might need to crack the client's db open and take a look.

in the mean time v3.2.0-alpha5 is out with preliminary search abilities. there are probably issues with timezone when searching with date/time filters, and the plate search is case sensitive right now.

View attachment 80236

Works pretty good. Lenient matches seems to work as I only gave it the first three letters out of 6 and it was able to find the plate.

The date range doesn't work if the start and end date are the same date. But works if they are different.

 

[mlapaglia]

lenient doesn't do anything yet, typing in a partial plate will always work as long as the plate contains the letters you submit in the same order

 

[biggen]

Yup, just figured that out!

Also noticed that if you are finished with searching for a plate and want to just go back to the dashboard (that's what I'm calling the area where the plates come in automatically) then just going back to the top "Plates" doesn't take you anywhere. You have to go "Home" or "Settings" or "Users" then "Plates" to get back to the main dashboard.

It may make sense to combine "Home" and "Plates" at some point in the future unless you have other ideas for "Home".

 

[biggen]

For some reason on this alpha5 I'm not getting immediate pictures of the cars or plates in the plate list. I'm getting the missing pictures icons on new cars. If I hit the refresh button of the browser, I can then see the new images.

 

[biggen]

You can see the missing icons here and then after I hit refresh they appear.

 

[biggen]

Actually I reverted back to alpha3 and I'm still not getting immedate pictures anymore which is strange. I have to refresh that as well. I'm not sure what changed. I'll have to check the log.

 

[mlapaglia]

try right clicking on one of the broken images and open it up in a new tab, does it work?

 

[biggen]

Something strange happened. I changed the default .jpeg storage amount from 8GB in the online Dashboard to 50GB and all hell broke loose. Agent disconnected and wouldn't reconnect even after a reboot of the NUC. I logged back into the agent settings and saw that the record 24x7 video boxed was now also checked on! I didn't do that. So I unchecked that and set the .jpeg storage back down to 8GB. Everything seems to be rolling smooth again and pictures on your plate dashboard are coming in without having to refresh. I dunno. Weird.

 

[mlapaglia]

it only tries to grab the image for the plate right when the page loads, i haven't optimized to do it when the panel opens. if the image isn't available when the page first loads it will be a broken image. there might be a timing issue, your browser is requesting the image from the agent before the agent has it available to serve? dunno..

 

[biggen]

I think it was an agent problem. When I changed that from 8GB to 50GB things went bat shit crazy. I'm going to do it again and see if I can replicate it.

 

[biggen]

Ok alpha5 is working fine just like the previous versions as far as the "plates" dashboard goes. It was an agent issue. I'm back on alpha5 now and it grabbing images immediately as soon as the next plate comes in.

I have no idea why setting the .jpeg storage to 50GB blew the agent up. I noticed when I logged back into the OpenALPR dashboard to set it back to 8GB for some reason it was filled in as 52GB and I know I set it to 50GB. Weirdness.

 

[mlapaglia]

i've got mine set to 2TB :|

 

[biggen]

Yeah there is a problem setting it. I just tested setting it to 16GB and it blows the agent up and says it can't connect to the camera. "Delayed linking" or something like that in the log. I guess I need to open a trouble ticket up with OpenALPR. I set it to 9GB (1GB more) and it working fine there.

Edit: So just hitting the "update" button seems to cause a problem with the agent in the OpenALPR dashboard. I have to actually shut the agent down and restart it when changing the image storage amounts. Man. I've wasted almost an hour trying to get more pictures stored. Should have been a 30 second change.

 

[wittaj]

@mlapaglia - I am assuming that your application that you developed will retain the historical information even if the picture is no longer available? So at some point it would simply show a ? or blank box if no photo is available?

I am fine with not keeping long term photos - do I really need 12,000 photos of my neighbors plates LOL, but would like the historical component. Having that history is so important - we have had some door checkers come thru here that the police believe are part of a car stealing ring as they took nothing from any vehicles that had laptops and other things in visible site, and I was able to see that they have been here before, so I was able to set up an email alert in Blue Iris that will send an email to the police when/if that plate comes back here again.

@biggen - thanks - that sounds great. So would a higher resolution photo be of benefit for OpenALPR in its recognition or is that coming from the stream and the photo is just for our benefit?

 

[mlapaglia]

the service holds the records in its own database, it references the agent to get the pictures. after the pictures get pruned by the agent the records will still exist in the service.

 

[biggen]

@biggen - thanks - that sounds great. So would a higher resolution photo be of benefit for OpenALPR in its recognition or is that coming from the stream and the photo is just for our benefit?

The AI recognition comes from the stream. I run 1080 with a high CBR of (16000kbps). You can go lower of course. I just like pristine video for LPR duty! The photo snapshot is just for our benefit so you don't have to fetch it from BI (or wherever you are recording to).

 

[biggen]

So this is weird. I was able to get Nginx Reverse Proxy Manger working. I have it running in another VM that is separate from your service. If I go to xyzdomain.com it forwards me to your service web page with SSL support. That all works great. But when I connect and go to look at the plates the thumbnails/plate pictures are missing from every entry. However, I can copy the picture link and paste it in a new tab and the picture loads. I'm at a loss why the thumbnails don't work but I have access to the pictures directly in the browser.

Of course if I don't use the reverse proxy and access the service via the normal private ip address, everything works fine as before.

Edit: Looks like a common problem with CSS and images when using Nginx as a reverse proxy. Just have to figure out how to get it to work. The basic issue is the static car/plate images aren’t hosted on the server that the reverse proxy can access. So I have to figure out how to pass the watchman ip (that holds the images) through to Nginx.

Edit2: Ahh. The problem is Nginx is loading your service over HTTPS but the CSS/HTML code tries to pull the images snapshots over plain HTTP. Then it looks like Chrome attempts to redirect it to HTTPS which causes it to fail.

Edit3: Fixed it! Had to enable "Insecure Content" for the specific site in Chrome by clicking on the lock in the address bar and going to "Site Settings". Chrome automatically blocks/upgrades any HTTP request to HTTPS which of course the Watchman agent doesn't support (or does it??). There is no security risk as far as I know because the picture request happens locally. Its then served back to the "Plate" dashboard over SSL.

 

[mlapaglia]

i can probably get the images from the agent through the service so it all comes from the same address when you are reverse proxying

 

[biggen]

That would be great if you can. At least I know how reverse proxying and nginx works now as I worked on it for most of the afternoon today. Tired of looking at it!

 

[wittaj]

Forgive me if this has already been answered, I tried to search through and never found it

With the $5 plan, it sounds like we need to port forward 3859 so that we can get the Cloud OpenALPR to send data?

If thats the case, is there any way to turn off the user registration so some rando can't just register?

OK hopefully my last question before I go down this rabbit hole and actually start trying to make it work LOL.

Is port forwarding needed? If so, how is this different than what is preached around here about never do port forwarding so that you do not get hacked?