Sighthound ALPR - Free - Seven Day Retention

S

SyconsciousAu

Getting comfortable
Sep 13, 2015
870
826
G'day Forum,

I've got some scotsman in me, so my favourite price of things is free. Today I've discovered Sighthound ALPR and have it working on my System.

It keeps nominating Finland and Poland as the source of my very Australian Plates, and it reads accurately so far, but the demo didn't read the personalised plates I gave it, so it's not 100%

US users may have better luck.

What I'm looking for now is one of you coding legends to find a way I can download the hits automatically.

Download and demo are here

Sighthound ALPR+ | Advanced License Plate Recognition & Vehicle Analytics | Sighthound, Inc.

Discover the cutting-edge solution for automatic license plate recognition and comprehensive vehicle analytics. Perfect for security, surveillance and traffic management, Sighthound ALPR+ system offers real-time data with robust analytics.
www.sighthound.com www.sighthound.com
 
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I like the promise: Always free, 5 users, 1 camera, 1000 look-ups per day, 7 days retention, includes plate, make, model, color, type.

I like their setup tour, pointing out how and where features are done.

The Windows app was installed, but I cannot get the stream IP and credentials to take.
 
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I have it running right now. So far, it is good. It does not appear to be as quick as OpenALPR on processing results, Going to let it run for a bit to see how it compares.
 
Is there a way to build a database or at least an Excel spreadsheet of the plates captured?
 
Figured out the stream address - I just had to copy the stream which OpenALPR uses.

The service is tagging a parked plate - wish there was a way to limit the area of interest.
 
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DLONG2 said:
Figured out the stream address - I just had to copy the stream which OpenALPR uses.

The service is tagging a parked plate - wish there was a way to limit the area of interest.
Click to expand...

I was thinking that using the camera's inbuilt privacy mask may work. Program seems to work much harder at night than during the day.

What resolutions and frame rates are people using? I started off with 4mp an 15 frames per second which was fine by day, processing delays generally staying under 20 seconds, but things rapidly blew out to more than 2 mins at night. Lowering the frame rate to 10 Fps helped and delays were generally less than 1m30s

I haven't worked out where the images and clips are being stored yet. I suspect it's somewhere on the C drive and that could cause space issues.

Found it

C:\ProgramData\Sighthound ALPR\storage
 
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SyconsciousAu said:
I was thinking that using the camera's inbuilt privacy mask may work. Program seems to work much harder at night than during the day.

What resolutions and frame rates are people using? I started off with 4mp an 15 frames per second which was fine by day, processing delays generally staying under 20 seconds, but things rapidly blew out to more than 2 mins at night. Lowering the frame rate to 10 Fps helped and delays were generally less than 1m30s

I haven't worked out where the images and clips are being stored yet. I suspect it's somewhere on the C drive and that could cause space issues.

Found it

C:\ProgramData\Sighthound ALPR\storage
Click to expand...

Thanks! Now I need to figure out how to effect the ROI on the Dahua Z12 camera, as parked cars take the brunt of the images whenever a moving car triggers the view.
 
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Are your still images in the same folder as mine? C:\ProgramData\Sighthound ALPR\storage\a7\55\(long folder name)\ ?
 
Unfortuantely I had to stop the SightHound software, as it was pegging my CPU to 100% and interfering with the OpenALPR captures which is also running on the same PC.

Now with just Blue Iris and OpenALPR, the CPU is back at the stable 36% level.
 
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There
DLONG2 said:
Are your still images in the same folder as mine? C:\ProgramData\Sighthound ALPR\storage\a7\55\(long folder name)\ ?
Click to expand...
There are a whole heap of subfolders. I'm trying to work out if it's random or if there is some sort of convention.
 
DLONG2 said:
Unfortuantely I had to stop the SightHound software, as it was pegging my CPU to 100% and interfering with the OpenALPR captures which is also running on the same PC.

Now with just Blue Iris and OpenALPR, the CPU is back at the stable 36% level.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I also did not like how power hungry this was so I moved it to my gaming computer that isn't used much.

How do you compare this to OpenLPR?
 
C:\ProgramData\Sighthound ALPR\db

That seems to be where the results are kept, but it appears the files are encrypted.
 
If you put

FOR /R "C:\ProgramData\Sighthound ALPR\storage" %%i IN (frame_*.jpg) DO COPY "%%i" "C:\YOUR PATH GOES HERE"
ForFiles /p "C:\YOUR PATH GOES HERE" /s /d -90 /c "cmd /c del @file"

into a batch file and run it, it will copy all of the full frame shots to another folder of your choice, and delete all of the files older than 90 days. You can change the 90 in the second line to any number you want.

That wont tell you what number plate was detected but you can still manually read them.

I suppose you could just run them back through the program if you wanted to read them again.

Hopefully someone better at this stuff than me will work out a way to save the files as the detected registration number.
 
It may depending on the traffic - I live on a road next to a school, so twice a day, there are a few hundred cars that go by within an hour. Eitherway, I don't think feeding this a live stream is best for me, but setting it up to review clips or images. I will try that out later.
 
I've discovered something about the software 1000 detections a day limit. It includes detections of vehicles and not just plates, and last night I detected somewhere around 1500 "vehicles" after a spider set up a web in front of my camera.
 
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NicholasBoccio said:
Yeah, I also did not like how power hungry this was so I moved it to my gaming computer that isn't used much.

How do you compare this to OpenLPR?
Click to expand...

I hadn't delved into the SightHound system after the CPU peg, so I can't comment on that. But with OpenALPR, and with GymRat's CSV collection and viewing app, he recently added the ability to automatically acquire the VIN, make, model, body, engine, etc. data from a JSON query of the plate and state. These data points are missing from the cheaper OpenALPR Watchman tier.

At least in the USA, just substitute the PLATE and STATE in this URL, and more often than not data will come back. The STATE is the two-character abbreviation, such as "CA" , "TX", or "NV" etc.

 
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