Review: IPC-LPR237B-IR / Equivalent of Dahua ITC237-PW6M-IRLZF1050-B - ANPR, Traffic & Access Control Camera

dimammx said:
Sad that even in this price range dahua struggles with day/night focus switch. Having zoom maxed out doesn't help either :(
What worked for me is finding perfect night focus and day focus, Noting the values, and finally setting the focus to night value with maybe 1-2 steps towards day focus value. Day time is more forgiving on the focus values.
Also have you played with WDR setting, on this cam it makes a lot of difference (on cheap z12 bullet changing wdr does nothing for me)
Click to expand...

I've played with and continue to play with all the settings. When the focus is correct, I get about 97 percent plate captures at night (audited this by manually checking BI footage with plate image), which is great, so I think my settings are dialed-in, it just took me a while to figure out that the focus was the issue and that I had a soft focus issue because the focus settings in the "Config(LPR)" button on the live view tab only show focus in intervals of 200. The "Guide" tab focus slider, on the other hand, has focus adjustments in increments of 1, which is what is needed in fixing soft focus on max zoom. It's a bit irritating that the "Config(LPR)" focus slider isn't the same, but oh well.

I'm really impressed with the SD card functionality. As wildcat noted in his original review, only plate snaps are recorded on the SD card, not footage. I've got a 256gb microsd installed and with an average of 700 vehicles passing a day, I've calculated that the SD card will hold a full year's worth of snaps. For folks who haven't used this camera, you can search the snaps in the SD card through the web GUI by plate number and it will show the dates, times, and images of when the plate was captured, in my case going back a year. I bought a 4 series NVR thinking that I needed it with this camera, but in the NVR you can only do an AI search in one week increments, so the the SD card search is superior in this respect. With the NVR each image will have corresponding footage linked that you can click and view, but given that it's in DAV format it would be easier to pull the BI footage if you really needed it for law enforcement purposes.
 
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wittaj said:
Yeah, I I would think push out the API command in Blue Iris or thru Task Scheduler would be the next step.
Click to expand...

The below HTTP call can be used to check the status of zoom and focus on Dahua cameras. It may be useful in determining if the focus or zoom is changing from day to night, etc. i.e. its only purpose is to GET data from the system and display the data for review.

Copy the URL into the URL bar of your browser. The browser will display a form asking for the user name and password. Note: Have not tested with BI, only with a Dahua NVR and FireFox.

login.PNG

Code: 
http://192.168.1.108/cgi-bin/devVideoInput.cgi?action=getFocusStatus&channel=1

Note: Dahua camera channel numbers run from 1 to 16. Thus camera 1 uses RJ-45 port 1 in this example. Change port number to access other cameras.

Have tested with Dahua HFW-5242 and HFW-7442 cameras. However, some FW versions will not be compatible. If successful, the screen will update as follows:

status.Focus=0.461783
status.FocusMotorSteps=314
status.LenAdjustStatus=1
status.ResetResult=Success
status.Status=Normal
status.Zoom=0.166870
status.ZoomMotorSteps=630

If not successful or the camera does not have zoom/focus, the result will be displayed as "Error Bad Request!".

To check, mouse over the tab that adjusts zoom and/or focus in SmartPSS by selecting the blue "e". Set the "speed" to 1 as if at 20 the value will not be accurate.

zoom-settings.PNG

To obtain the tab number multiply the "Focus Number" by the "Focus Motor Steps". The same for zoom. (i.e. .461783 x 314 = 144.999862) Which is very close to the mouse over tab number of 145.
 
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Command works got my night numbers, lets see if it changes in the day.

status.Focus=0.244444
status.FocusMotorSteps=720
status.Status=Normal
status.Zoom=1.000000
status.ZoomMotorSteps=2287
 
dimammx said:
Command works got my night numbers, lets see if it changes in the day.

status.Focus=0.244444
status.FocusMotorSteps=720
status.Status=Normal
status.Zoom=1.000000
status.ZoomMotorSteps=2287
Click to expand...

Scheduling commands from Blue Iris worked for me to manually adjust my focus once it got dark. I got the script from one of the Dahua API documents floating around and followed the instructions in bp2008's post, using the following command:

http://<username>:<password>@<ip address of camera>/cgi-bin/devVideoInput.cgi?action=adjustFocus&focus=<focus value in decimal>&zoom=<zoom value>
 
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While we talk about API commands and this camera.
Has anyone found a command to pull the latest plate / vehicle data?
 
genelit said:
While we talk about API commands and this camera.
Has anyone found a command to pull the latest plate / vehicle data?
Click to expand...
There is whole ITCPUSH protocol which i assume pushes all kind of information to a external server,
but so far could not find any documentation on it.


P.S. Reran commands during the day
same numbers. So looks like no focus compensation for day/nigh.
status.Focus=0.244444
status.FocusMotorSteps=720
status.Status=Normal
status.Zoom=1.000000
status.ZoomMotorSteps=2287
 
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dimammx said:
There is whole ITCPUSH protocol which i assume pushes all kind of information to a external server,
but so far could not find any documentation on it.


P.S. Reran commands during the day
same numbers. So looks like no focus compensation for day/nigh.
status.Focus=0.244444
status.FocusMotorSteps=720
status.Status=Normal
status.Zoom=1.000000
status.ZoomMotorSteps=2287
Click to expand...

Interesting. Looks like you're also at full zoom. When push I a command to manually focus at night it stays that way until a couple of minutes after sunrise, when the focus auto adjusts to about 10 less. I have an area drawn for regional focus, so I assume that area is what is being checked and adjusted for.
 
My cam just started acting up. At first it was showing strange color HUE in the BlueIris, browser feed was ok, reboot fixed the issue.
Next day camera started having intermittent connection drops in BI, web interface was ok and ALPR on cam worked fine. REboot of cam fixed BI issue again.
Today BI showed cam disconnected, when i loged in to the cam web interface it showed all the menus ok but NO video feed AND there was NO ALPR for the past day :( . Reboot fixed it.
So it is getting worse, i checked cable connectors and did network cable test with the tool , it tested ok. Not sure what to do next. I remember some people mentioned dahuas acting up with full sd cards, it is not full but it is large, 89GB out of 120GB is occupied. Any ideas?
 
dimammx said:
My cam just started acting up. At first it was showing strange color HUE in the BlueIris, browser feed was ok, reboot fixed the issue.
Next day camera started having intermittent connection drops in BI, web interface was ok and ALPR on cam worked fine. REboot of cam fixed BI issue again.
Today BI showed cam disconnected, when i loged in to the cam web interface it showed all the menus ok but NO video feed AND there was NO ALPR for the past day :( . Reboot fixed it.
So it is getting worse, i checked cable connectors and did network cable test with the tool , it tested ok. Not sure what to do next. I remember some people mentioned dahuas acting up with full sd cards, it is not full but it is large, 89GB out of 120GB is occupied. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

This has happened to me a few times--usually after the weekly scheduled reboot occurs. I could log into the camera but the video feed was black and the bit rate was very low. For all my Dahua cams also choose "VBR" and for this issue, that was my problem. After power cycling and trying various things, the video reappeared and became stable when I changed the video setting back to the default "CBR."
 
A couple of times that this happened I did a factory reset. Have you tried that yet? It's a pain, but because there aren't as many settings in this cam I found it to be less intrusive that factory resetting other Dahua cams.
 
Not yet, just curious if somehow SD card might be causing it, Maybe will try to put in fresh one just to test. Did you format SD card while doing reset as well?
Also ALPR jus stopped working again, and I think it might have been triggered by passing car.
 
dimammx said:
Not yet, just curious if somehow SD card might be causing it, Maybe will try to put in fresh one just to test. Did you format SD card while doing reset as well?
Also ALPR jus stopped working again, and I think it might have been triggered by passing car.
Click to expand...
I didn't format the card when I reset. It worked fine after and the card remained compatible after the factory reset.
 
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Ok suspicion somewhat confirmed, ALPR tried to capture plate, it did not work and boom BI feed went bad
1643072573800.png
 
Redo the find/inspect in Blue Iris for that camera.

Confirm the power supply is not going bad. I had a similar issue when a POE port started failing. It was OpenALPR that gave me similar images, but it was fine in BI and in the camera GUI.
 
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ITC237-PW6M-IRLZF
Equipment Code FPGA Version
Hardware Version 2.00
Algorithm Version libits v1.0.251932:Jun 17 2020 226327 0.0.0
Radar Version
System Version2.623.10BE000.0.R, Build Date: 2020-06-30

Still waiting to try an update :)
 
dimammx said:
ITC237-PW6M-IRLZF
Equipment Code FPGA Version
Hardware Version 2.00
Algorithm Version libits v1.0.251932:Jun 17 2020 226327 0.0.0
Radar Version
System Version2.623.10BE000.0.R, Build Date: 2020-06-30

Still waiting to try an update :)
Click to expand...
Interesting. My hardware version is 1.0 and I bought mine in October 2021.
 
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