dvarapala

I haven't tried it yet - still getting the camera set up. Right now it's sitting in the window of my office, which gives it a pretty bad angle of view. I can still read the plates easily, but the skew is pretty bad and i suspect the software would have a difficult time with it. I have ordered an outdoor housing (thanks, SEANHAWG!) so I can put it into a more favorable (outdoor) position. Once that's working I'll start playing with the OCR software.

My goal: to put together a dedicated cam for capturing license plates - manually at first, but with the possibility of going to an automated system later. I really like the Mobotix M12 with the LPF lens, but at ~$2000 that's just way more than I can afford. I'm thinking the following combination would work for less than half the price of the Mobotix: Arecont AV1310DN IP camera http://www.arecontvision.com/index.php?section=product&subsection=product_details&product_id=34 Computar M1214-MP2 manual iris F1.4 lens http://computarganz.com/product_view.cfm?product_id=553 A C-to-CS mount adapter for the lens A visible-light-blocking filter that allows IR above ~830nM to pass (attached with duct tape ) Some kind of IR illuminator (TBD) A suitable outdoor housing Any obvious problems with this approach? Is the manual iris lens going to be a problem?

It's not useless to me - in fact, I prefer MJPEG because it's simpler for my software to process on the receiving end. Regarding your original question about size, the compact models can fit easily into a small dome enclosure - something a normal-sized box camera could never do. So it gives you more flexibility in housings/mounting.

The lighting is the toughest part. I can capture sharp, clear plate images all day long; night time is when the problems crop up. Right now I'm experimenting with IR illuminators... Through experimentation I've found that a 1ms shutter speed works quite well as long as there is enough light. Here you go - start raking in the big bucks! http://javaanpr.sourceforge.net/

Of course it is. That's the nature of interlaced video - if there is any movement between one field and the next, you get jagged edges. Just because your DVR has some deinterlacing software that makes it less obvious doesn't mean it's not there. Well, they sure stopped me from capturing license plates of passing cars from my office window. My initial efforts involved an analog camera hooked up to a video capture card. The interlaced images that resulted never yielded a legible plate, not even once. When I replaced that analog camera with a progressive scan IP camera in the exact same location, the license plates were captured sharp and clear. Could I have eventually gotten that analog camera to work? Probably. But the progressive scan IP camera did a much better job with a lot less work. As Charlie Sheen would say, that's winning.

There is often a big chimney-like space that runs between floors to allow plumbing and HVAC ductwork to run from the first floor up to the attic. Follow the big duct coming out of the top of the furnace and see where it leads. Then talk your customer into mounting their cameras just on the other side of it.

Depends on your definition of "working." "Working" in this context shall indicate that the camera apparatus can capture a clear image of the license plates on passing vehicles under all ambient lighting conditions. At some point in the future I want to experiment with some automated image processing software to OCR the plates automatically. Initially, however, it is enough to capture clear images for manual review.

True, but there are tradeoffs. My very first camera was a CNB, and the interlacing distortion drove me absolutely insane! What good is better low-light performance if the jaggies prevent you from seeing important details? Personally, I would rather have progressive scan, even if it means adding more lighting to the system.

Not at all. It also works with analog cameras (using a suitable capture card), and even USB webcams. As far as IP cameras go, it'll work with most anything that can spit out JPEG/MJPEG or an H.264 RTSP stream. But the best part is, if you have a camera that you absolutely must support, and ZM does not currently support it, you can add support for it yourself. For example, someone added support for Mobotix's MxPEG protocol to ZM. With a closed, proprietary VMS, you'd have to beg the company that makes it to add the support you need; even if they agree to do it for you, they certainly won't do it with the same priority or sense of urgency that you have.

Your expectations may be a little high. No camera - especially a megapixel CCTV camera - is going to see stars without a long exposure time. Unfortunately, long exposure time is the enemy of motion capture, and capturing moving objects is the main reason why you use a video camera (i.e. instead of a still camera) in the first place. So you need to either find a way to shed more light on your subject, or lengthen your exposure time (and suffer with the motion blur). There's just no violating the laws of physics.

OK. Getting images from an IP camera is pretty simple: you open a TCP connection to the camera's address, issue an appropriate HTTP request (varies slightly by type of camera), and the camera sends you back either a static JPEG image or a streaming series of JPEGs (called Motion JPEG, or MJPEG). Your code decompresses each JPEG image and displays it on the screen. There is an open-source JPEG library available which you can simply link into your program and use, so you don't even have to understand how JPEG compression works. Piece of cake! Note: the procedure is a little more involved if the camera only does H.264, so be sure to pick a camera that does MJPEG if you can.

FYI, the IR LEDs can be disabled on one of the camera's configuration pages. I have my IP8332 mounted in a window right now, as a matter of fact, and it works fine.

It's probably the noise in the picture - Gaussian noise is difficult to compress. My DFL-20S looks like a snowstorm under low light conditions.

Would it be possible for us to talk to your software developer(s) directly? That would be the most efficient way for us to help you accomplish what you want.

Assuming your Android tablet has a web browser, you can do this today with just about any IP camera and a WiFi access point.

By "non-IR camera" I assume you mean that the camera's IR cut filter is fixed in place; if so, the answer to your question is yes. Of course, you'll be paying extra for the IR-correction capability of the lens that you'll be unable to use, so it's best to find a non-IR-corrected lens if you can.

Heh heh - Mobotix M12s look like a cross between a Star Wars stormtrooper and a pug. Fantastic image quality, though.

What sorts of creative things have you done to make outdoor security equipment less obvious? I was thinking of maybe building a hollow base or pedestal for a birdhouse or a piece of garden sculpture and hiding a camera/IR illuminator/PIR motion sensor/whatever inside of it. For a dome camera, I thought of one of those bronze sun thingamabobs with the center orb replaced by the smoked plexiglas camera dome. C'mon, let's hear your creative ideas!

But for that you need to run a frontend server or PC, I'm trying to do it as streamlined as possible, my home is very green, lots of solar power so running a pc 24*7 sucking 200 watts isn't out of the question, but an independent NAS trickling at about 8 watts is more in line with my thinking. Ah, well, you didn't disclose that requirement in your original post. However, if you think about it, what is a NAS? It's nothing more than a (dedicated, embedded) computer with a network interface and some disk drives. If you can find a NAS that meets your power specs and runs Linux, maybe you can get ZoneMinder or some other VMS software to run on it. Of course, you can also spend the big bucks and buy Mobotix cameras, which will record to a NAS right out of the box. It's not easy being Green.

As an aside, the reason you lost that auction is because you didn't follow the cardinal rule of eBay bidding: bid once, for the maximum amount you're willing to spend, as late in the auction as you can, preferably within the last 30 seconds. This is what the "sniper" did, and that's why he walked away with your dome housing. If you had raised your initial bid by $1, $5, or whatever your true maximum bid was, you would have won that auction. I've had these so-called "snipers" bid against me in the last 3 seconds of an auction, yet I still won. " title="Applause" /> If, OTOH, you bid your true maximum price and you still don't win the item, then you can feel good about not having paid too much. But I digress.

A better question is why wouldn't you? Go ahead, name a megapixel IP camera which has better bang for the buck than the IP8332.

My "unreliable freeware VMS" (ZoneMinder) can record from my IP8332 at full resolution and full frame rate continuously for as long as I want.

Arecont also makes a dome enclosure for their cameras: http://arecontvision.com/4inch-dome.html

I own a P3344 - not the same as yours, of course, but similar. It's low-light performance is OK as long as nothing is moving; in order to get a nice, low-noise image it uses a shutter speed of about 1/6th second. At that speed, moving objects are an unrecognizable blur. Forcing the shutter speed to 1/30th or faster reduces the blur but significantly increases the noise in the image. FWIW, I also own a Vivotek IP8332 - same resolution (1280x800) in a bullet form factor at less than half the price. The Axis has a very slight edge in terms of picture quality, but it's definitely not $600 better. OTOH the Axis has a varifocal lens and remote focus and zoom which are both extremely handy, but still not worth the additional cost to me. If I had it to do over again, I'd have bought two of the Vivoteks and passed on the Axis.

ZoneMinder will do this. It has a "montage" view which can show multiple cameras at once; it can also cycle through them one at a time. http://www.zoneminder.com