Hey all,
Anyone got OpenALPR up and running, what cameras have people found best to use? And what distance do you have it from the point it’s reading plates? I have it running but can’t find a camera that provides the quality needed?
I haven’t found a single post about anyone who’s got it working, especially ALPR local.
And now that ALPR have changed their free cloud tier to only 50 API calls per month, that’s no good either!
I’ve not been able to find any kind of alternative so far…
I built my own running out of docker using Openalpr, no cloud needed. I published it here https://github.com/samtwilliams/ha-openalpr
May need some adoption for your needs but the basics will be the same. Ps I’m no dev so I’m sure the code could be improved
Hi Sam - yes, I saw your work actually, but not sure how I can integrate it with Home Assistant providing the stream.
Looking at the stream component it seems to be for recording, not serving via IP. And according to Home Assistant, Ring cameras (such as I have) don’t support live viewing (and therefore streaming?) Hmm, lots to look at still I think, but thanks for your help.
Ah ok, for reference I’ve tried a number of cameras and although a proper anpr camera will be best they are expensive! That said I explored and tested a number of cameras. I got a reasonably cheap ip can (about £100) and it works fine.
You need something with good optical zoom and not digital and hd is possible I’d say 4mp minimum. This site has some good reading https://platerecognizer.com/blog/camera-setup/
Anyways on a side note anpr engines can be a tad cpu hungry At times, you would want to avoid any unnecessary programs so I would avoid taking a stream from ha and send it direct you your engine and have the engine call HA api success.
Yep, it’s a tricky one. I’ve got as far as the ALPR binaries configured on a spare laptop, and had decided on MQTT to send back the API success, but it’s the initiation that’s the challenge.
As the alpr executable likes JPGs I’m thinking HA sees motion, I use something to grab the plate region as a picture and SSH that to the laptop, a folder watcher on the laptop invokes the script and boom!
Interesting challenge - thanks for your feedback, have a good day!
Hey Andy,
So i think you will find you will need to supply many images to get a positive match, i tried what you said about supplying one image and didn’t have much if any success unless it was a perfect picture. You will need to establish a good FPS rate based on the average vehicle speed when its pulling up to the gate/camera. Then supply all of the frames to openalpr so it can scan them all, it may get multiple hits but you can protect against multiple fires.
I’d be really interested to see how you get on with your approach(s) so could you update this thread with your results at some point as i may be able to approve mine.
Sam