buellwinkle

iVMS4200 PCNVR will work, but not the most intuitive. BlueIris is a great product for the money, but you may need a larger processor than if you use iVMS4200. Milestone XProtect is more industrial strength and I like it and was worth the added expense to me.

Shouldn't you be able to use the Avigilon Control Center LPR plug-in? Seems like a quick install. You can get it from their website here - http://avigilon.com/support-and-downloads/for-software/acc-integration-and-plug-in-downloads/ and sure you can get the license from the same person you got the NVR software license from.

Let us know how that works out when you get it.

I don't think blinding drivers is a concern here in California because the tolll road authority implemented LPR for toll collection and they use 2 flash, one to capture you front, one to capture the rear. At night, it looks like a lightning storm from a distance with the flashes going off for each lane in both directions every second or so. I have to close my eyes when I drive through. Most surfaces are to some degree reflective, not retro-reflective. Some of the light will scatter, and much of the light will bounce off at an equal but opposite angle. Keep in mind that LPR cameras are typically at an angle so you can read multiple plates if the cars are moving closely together. The amount of white light required to scatter back to the camera from a reflective plate and sufficiently mask the headlights or taillights would likely distract the driver. That is one of the benefits of IR; it does not distract the driver. The benefit of retro-reflective plates is that much of the light bounces back in the same direction as the light source.

What if you throw a good amount of light on it so it balances out glare from other lights at night.

I haven't looked at that model that closely, but does that model have a RS232 port on the circuit board? You may be able to use that to connect at the boot loader level to see what's happening.

Yes, its been on the US site for a while. Cameras are now doing with V2.5.

Not familiar with SDI, but with the Hikvision it's easy because I can set separate day & night image settings, so I set 1/30 max exposure during the day and 1/200 at night. Same with WDR, I set it on during the day, off at night. The only PITA is that with Hikvision, I have to set a fixed schedule for this to happen, so every few months I have to change the start/end times. What I wanted to do was either write a program on my NVR PC to set the start/end times using a calendar, or maybe write it into a Raspberry PI. This setting on the camera is independent of the IR cut filter day/night setting.

Milestone XProtect Express with LPR.

Nice IR image of an Alberta red number plate from your post ak357. The problem I'm having with one LPR camera, the Avigilon dome is the sun shining on the plate sort of washes out the plate number, enough so the software can't make out the plate number during the late afternoons.

What I found is that if you use TFTP to load new firmware, it resets the password, so try that.

Check this out on Geovision website - http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/Prod_GVLPRHybridCam.asp Look at the sample images, pretty cool right except the state name is missing, hmm. So I dug deeper and those are uniquely Washington state license plates. This is what it looks like during the day. See "Washington" in red.

Which Geovision because the LPR one I looked at did not see red at night, the one I mentioned earlier. Heck, even the sample images from Geovision website are not showing red. Do you have one of these cameras? Can you show us a night shot showing red characters?

You can probably put in your own telnetd in that file, remove the symbolic link to busybox, recreate the cramfs file, zip it back together and do a firmware update to make telnet behave as normal in terms of password, using the standard password.

It's all about the settings, you don't need to have fixed exposure, just a fast max exposure, about 1/200 and kick gain down a bit, maybe 75 or so the image look close to black except plates and headlights. My image is very dark, then the car turns the cul-de-sac and it's instant bright lights and there's no adjustment period, do you want me to post the video. I don't know the angle but my camera is mounted on the fascia board of my garage roof just above the garage door. The camera is pointed to the opposite end of the property which is about 50' if it was a straight line, but angled towards the street it may be 60' or so. The distance between the camera and curb is about 30'. If I had to guess angle, in this picture, about 31 degrees, cars towards the middle of the street that I captured, about 38 degrees. Those are good plate capture angles. As for 80', that's pushing it for that IR, but I get plate reflectivity but your IR 's diminishing/failing. May be worth getting a decent illuminator or maybe an indecent one. As for red letter plates, if you can read red on white then that's awesome because none of my cameras see red at night, just comes out white. For example, look at the plate in this picture and try and read the word California which is red above the plate number, I can't. If you have an image from a camera of red letter on white background or white letters on red background taken at night without an IR filter (nigh mode), please show us. Sure, if you have an IR filter on the camera then you can see red vs. white, but then you can't use IR illuminators.

Sergie, I got the latest firmware for my Dahua camera, an old ipc-hfw2100, firmware from April 2014. Loaded on the cameras fine. In Linux I did a unzip on the bin file, created the following files - dm365_ubl_boot_16M_norflash.bin.img dm365_ubl_boot_16M_spiflash.bin.img kernel-x.cramfs.img pd-x.cramfs.img romfs-x.cramfs.img user-x.cramfs.img web-x.cramfs.img The interesting thing is they have cramfs in the file name instead of ubifs like you found. I did a binwalk -e on the romfs one and it create a directory with a file 40.cramfs. I did a mount on it, mount -t cramfs -o loop 40.cramfs /mnt/romfs. The root Linux directories are there, bin, dev, etc, home, mnt, proc, sbin..... just like you got from ubis but cramfs may be easier since I just mounted it. The password prefix is in the bin/busybox. In a hex dump, it's next to the word Password: so somewhat identifiable. My educated guess is that it's in telnetd. Doing a ps shows /utils/telnetd but that's a link to /bin/busybox.

Just showing an example, I have plenty every day, a different speeds, different plates. In California front plates are required, but many here in the O.C. do not follow that rule, but go to L.A. and you'll get a ticket. But you can aim the camera at rear plates just as easily and could have done if I wanted too by my primary goal for this camera was mail box theft and license plate capture was a bonus. Rear plates are way easier to capture for 2 reason, most are lit or at least required to be lit by law, and you don't have to overcome headlights, especially large ones like from the example I provided. I my specific case, if I wanted rear plates, I would have to go with a 25mm lens to capture them from the other direction. I tried with a 12mm but in my case, it's just too far away for a 12mm. One caveat, as I've said before with plates with IR cameras, including the Geovision LPR is that you can not capture plates with red characters, for example Illinois license plates. If you are not sure, ask the manufacturer if their cameras can capture Illinois plate number at night (Alberta if you are in or near Canada).

That was not a stationary vehicle.

Reading plates is tricky. Try setting the max exposure to 1/200 and the max gain down to about 75. You'll likely see the plate and not much else, a trade off between reading a plate and seeing everything but the plate. Most cameras these days that have IR tend to have the flashlight effect so the center is much brighter and drops off near the edge. Surprised it's not better with an outdoor light.

It gets pretty expensive with LPR and you are typically charged per lane and while their software is one of the least expensive LPR solutions out there at about $800/camera, it's far from the best. My cameras is set at 1/200 second exposure, I'm pretty sure I can capture a car going much faster. Certainly fast enough to get a plate going in/out of a parking lot. The only reason we do LPR is to activate a gate automatically based on a plate match. From a security standpoint, not sure you would benefit from LPR as you just want to see a plate in a video.

Could be, but the one I've had looked at was this one - http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/Prod_GVLPRHybridCam.asp You can make out plates, but not any better than a Hikvision camera. Has a 1/500th max exposure and the pictures just came out dark and the plate was readable but you had to strain to see it. Do you have a better experience with their LPR IP cameras?

Can you post where to get that release. I can only find slightly newer and slightly order but nothing from 6-13-2014. Once we have firmware, we may be able to get that password for you.

Funny you should ask because I put up my first LPC (license plate capture vs. license plate recognition) camera last week and been tweaking it. I've done LPR several times before, but this is likely what most people here want to do, which is capture plates in videos, but not do LPR. It's a Hikvision mini bullet, the ds-2cd2032-i 12mm. I've getting very good plate captures day or night now at about 50-60' and it's awesome. Even full on headlights at night. Click on the image to see it bigger, then click on the 4 arrows in the lower right to see it at the full 3MP so you have an idea of what is possible. There's really not much difference between a camera sold for LPR vs. a decent camera, just marketing. Also most sold for LPR are not LPR, but just LPC. The different is LPR implies that it's doing character recognition for storing as text and doing event processing on a plate match. BTW, I've seen the Geovision LPR camera in action and there's likely now way I can see that working for true LPR, at best LPC and even then, the image is not as clear as with the cheap Hikvision.

Good work on tearing it apart. Getting from bin to the img files is easy enough, I just used WinRAR and it gave me those files. What's interesting is the bin file I have which is the latest for my ipc-hfw2100 has the img files with cramfs vs ubis and I noticed Hikvision going this route on newer cameras, probably because cramfs is a read only file system, less tampering. Maybe the firmware file you have is older and it really is that old password. Do you think if you made a change, say to a menu or something, use the cramfs tools or ubifs, you can build a firmware file that will load into the camera? Would be cool to have a script that does what you did but extracts everything out into a file system that you can edit. Then a script that puts it all back. Seems like you are 90% there.