Can anybody share experience with various vendors for LPR (License Plate Recognition) and/or vehicle make/model classification systems?
I’m looking for something suitable for vehicles coming onto or leaving a commercial property. A ready made system would be great, but the ones I’ve seen for highways are pricey. Something between those high end systems and scratch-built DIY would be great, even if it involves recurring cost for processing/ support…
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I think you need to better specify your needs. What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Also, what is the budget for the project. Your budget may be the ultimate limiting factor.
It’s easier to discuss by voice because there’s a fair degree of variability and flexibility.
Maybe this way:
- Commercial setting
- Outdoor monitoring of 2 or 3 property parking lot entrances
- Ability to recognize & time tag vehicle license plates, and classify make/model as vehicles come and go
- Cloud connected / secured / RESTful APIs
- KISS (e.g. assume daylight, vehicles under 20 mph, tolerance for recognition accuracy, etc.)
- Something in the range of low thousands of dollars per installed camera, versus tens of thousands of dollars
- Readymade system is preferred; some level of DIY integration is acceptable; scratch-built DIY is a non-starter
I’d just like to talk to people who’ve looked at or could recommend vendors in the space, for part or all of the solution…
That is a good explanation of a system, but still doesn’t explain the issue your trying to solve.
I get that you are working with a couple parking lots, but what do you want to do with the information you are gathering? Are you trying to bill for how long a car is parked? Are you trying to control access based on license plate? I doubt a budget of $2K or $3K will be enough for a turnkey image recognition system with weather proof housing and cloud integration.
So, you may have to go with a lower tech solution. For example, if you are trying to tell if a parking lot is full or not, a gate with 2 buttons that open it can solve that problem. when you hit one button increase the count, when you hit the other, decrease the count. when the count is the same as the amount of parking spots, disable the entrance button, until someone leaves.
Not trying to pick on you, just trying to understand the problem in order to find a less expensive option.
Also, have you looked into GeoVision? I think their software is in the 1.5K range, but can handle multiple cameras, so if you have the ability to host everything you need under one license, this might work for your budget?
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All cool - those are all valid and execellent questions. I like & appreciate lower tech brainstorming. The use case / purpose relates to market research, but I’m not able to get far into details. GeoVision looks interesting & might work. This is one of those cases where building up a pool of ‘available’ can help bake decision criteria…
If your gathering marketing info, I would go with a system like GeoVision, and link your data with a data base online. I know there is a system that can pull up a ton of info based on license plate number, my insurance provider has it linked to their system for quoting Auto insurance, not sure how it works, but seems to guess who drive the vehicle the most based on some data set. It even picked me out as the primary driver of a vehicle that I don’t own. Not sure how it did that, but it was accurate?
I’ll chat with my insurance guy and ask if he knows at all what systems they are linked with. Warning now, they are probably not cheap.
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Publicdata.com allows you to lookup license plates.
You could shoot pics of the cars and pay kids to manually type them in later.
As far as cheap automation,
Maybe shoot pics, convert pic to tiff, and then do OCR using Tesseract.
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Just so your aware this also borders into Texas DPS PSB regulated industry requiring company and individual licensing or risk of criminal and financial penalties. Also while you can use public data for plate searches a valid reason according to DPPA is required.
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Thanks for the heads up!
Carl, Our company was looking into DMV plate search. There was an outfit called Digital Recognition Network we are working alongside. They mostly do B2B work but I bet they could help point you in the right direction.
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Lowest tech solution: a motion-activated web-recording camera and Fivvr/Craigslist-hired part-timers to manually review and record info. Might be cheaper if this is a short-term problem being addressed.
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Thanks all for the brainstorming & leads. I’m folding those into the evaluation pool…