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Hi all, i'm learning about a LPR system: car license plate recognition. I see everywhere dozens of specialized sw very expensive (thousand of euros). Sure, this is quality stuff for governments , police and so on.
Isn't there a cheap way? and my goal is cheap too: i don't have to control a highway traffic, simply take a picture of the veichle, recognize its plate, compare with the "good" (family or friends) or "bad" (people not allowed to run in my private route)plates.
So to record all.
Cheap means dream ? I hope not! The problem is a good OCR and the automatization of all the process, but i'm not a programmer!
cheers.
lorenzo

this could be an example,

http://www.jupisys.com/callisto.htm

i have already cameras and dvr , problem is software, i forgot : in a day i have to check , may be 10-12 cars, so not a big job for software and hardware

There's some Tesseract-based Windows software at http://www.freeocr.net/ test page http://asv.aso.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp/tesseract
I have not tried it and don't know how good or bad it is.

Hi Stevexyz, i have just tried to upload an image with a license plate:NOTHING to do! by the way they declare you should input a text documento with no dirt around...... just image the front of a car....
Let's do some more brain storming!
cheers.
lorenzo

Here are lots of plates: http://www.olavsplates.com/italy.html
Maybe general OCR is too much? You don't want to match words after all. It looks as though Italian plates are of the form:
<font face="Courier New">
^[[:alpha:]]{2}[[:digit:]]{3}[[:alpha:]]{2}$</font id="Courier New">

Perhaps this pattern might assist automatic identification?

Or how about taking a few pictures of each number plate you want to accept then trying to match against those? This means no OCR, just some kind of image matching perhaps?

You see, there isn't only one standard. it depends how old is your car. My goal was about security, i'm going to explain better: there's a single , private road to my house, only some people (2-neighbourds, living here only for summer holidays) have a reason to go along that road. So if someone, in a dark winter day/night, go along my road , may be they are "looking for robbery". Because i can install a cam where my private road begins, i was thinking this: cam detects a car , it takes picture, it checks allowed license plate, if not in that list , Homeseer sends immediatly an email with picture and a sms to my phone.So i'm in red-allert! and can call my local police to check in. Thats it.
That's because i was looking for a sw , able to work alone , without human actions

It's called a fence (recinto)

--
<h6>Anyone interested in time travel meet me here last Thursday!!</h6>
[ status banner ff off-line i.v.m. server updates.]

Dacolian is a Dutch company which developed software for license plate recognition. I've seen the system and it works really good. It's being used on the Dutch highways and by the police.
Perhaps this solution helps you.

The URL is: http://www.dacolian.nl/en/

Hi wifi , so you speak italian!, i'd like to add to the RECINTO ,this one
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-n_wtt_ ... mercenary/

Herbus thanks, i can ask, but it' will have hard price...

Wow.. The Mercenary looks so sweet!
I could really use one in my garden agains all the cats that are taking a crap in it.

--
<h6>Anyone interested in time travel meet me here last Thursday!!</h6>
[ status banner ff off-line i.v.m. server updates.]

thats better....http://www.paintballsentry.com/index.html and this is the best http://www.thesentrygun.com/

lorenzo.

Perhaps look at machine vision systems, for example
http://www.roborealm.com/tutorial/Digit ... ide010.php

This example/tutorial shows a cam looking at a temperature LCD screen.
Although it will be hard to capture the license plate on a driving car.

Hi guys , I GOT THAT !!

i found a FREE to use Java application that works like a charm.

you can use by command line
you have a report as html file

i was thinking :

homeseer,
security cam that send email with car picture
picture is saved and processed by java application
html report contains a field with plate number
extraction of this number
this number in compared to "friend" numbers , if not send a warning to mail , sms etc......

see screenshot 1 and 2

download here : http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaanp ... p/download

And now you're asking for a HS script, right?

Alexander are you a programmer or mind scientist ? you have just read in my mind I'm studiying VB, but i'm not ready.......