Scruit

I cant agree with that 100%, ive been pulling the plug on my computers for years now even back to the Win ME days .. although with Win ME other issues arrised .. but other than that, pulling the plug or every other day power outages, with no UPS, and I never get any file corruption ... unless ofcourse you have an opened document. Do I recommend pulling the plug? No, but neither do I recommend working 48 hours with no sleep .. and yet I still do that. My day job is a Systems Engineer and Database Administrator - basically I build datacenter server systems for a living. I regularly see servers having problems when power is suddenly lost. The question is, can the OS and/or application recover from that when it starts back up. Can it rebuild the indexes / files etc back to where you were? If so, then you're fine. If not, then you've lost something. Just depends on if it was something important. When your PC boots back up into CHKDSK it's becuase the data on the drive was corrupt. If you've never lost any data then you have been lucky. (My stepfather used to drive home from the pub drunk every sunday - he never crashed into any other cars. That was just luck too) I have an 8-year-old DVR from "All about Image Recognition and Processing" which will corrupt 50% of the time of it loses power. The hd shows up as blank. I also used to have a CPD576W that would be ok with power loss but every once in a while the HD would show up as blank when it came back up.

It will take the DVR time to start back up. Some take a minute or more to boot up. also, if the DVR uses drive caching then you might lose video or corrupt the hard drive. Even if the DVR doesn't use caching, the hard drive probably caches on the controller and you could lose that. I've had DVRs that car survive a power outage with no problems, but I've also had a couple where every so often the hard drive would become corrupt after the sudden power loss. For several reasons it's a good idea to avoid having the DVR lose power suddenly. Imagine sitting there in front of a homeowner that has been burgled and you can't produce the video because the hard drive is corrupt. For $100 it just makes sense.

If you use a piece of 4x4 pressure treated lumber it will be plenty strong enough and still break away in an accident. Concrete it down below the frost line and you're golden. Also, how about putting a fake bird house on it hide the cameras inside it? That will make the install discreet but still give passers-by a good reason for the pole being there. I agree with the enter-slow leave-fast principle. Especially if they have been spooked away from the house they robbed - they may pass through the cam too quickly. Much more likely to drive in slow. I have a CP1000AVRLCD from CyberPower. It's 1000va and keeps my DVR and half my cameras running for ~20 minutes. Cost is a little over $100. Walmart has them.

Just be careful you don't mount the pole too close to the road. Between teh telephone poles is considered the right-of-way for the highway. And ensure it is a break away design. I would probably opt to put the camera on the side of the road so that you are looking at the back of the car in the nearest lane. But so it still covers your neighbor's driveway. So move the post closer to the main road but turn it facing away from the main road so you catch cars as they enter the subdivision. Yes, but do they get 15fps by using an extreme compression that loses too much detail to keep the plate #. Better DVRs will have a better playback image with more retained detail. What will you do if that neighbor is not home when you need the footage? Or is out of town? Network access will allow you to download the video for the police from your own home. Or from the homes of a couple of other nominated operators. You don't need to watch it live, you just need to be able to get the plate# to the police as quickly as possible when something happens. Remote access also means that more than one person can be given the task of checking to make sure there are no problem. At the very least I would log in to the DVR once a week and just make sure it's ok. In my home system I can see the 16-way screen on my TV in the den, and I usually glance at it every couple of days just long enough to make sure all 16 cameras are working ok. About once a week I will search for recorded video for two reasons: (1) So I know it is recording ok, and (2) so I keep in practice and am not trying to learn how to export video in a real situation. Get a 750 va UPS to smooth out the power outages <15 mins. For longer power outages, any reasonable DVR will start up again after power loss. Perfect!

Max is 7.6m according to http://resource.boschsecurity.com/documents/REG-XClose-rang_DataSheet_enUS_T5005531019.pdf which is 25' I already said he was pushing it with the range which is why there is still some tweaking needed in the layout. So you don't like cheap DVRs. Fine. I ask again, what DVR would you recommend? I would stay away from AVTech/CPCam because their remote access is a joke. The only other DVR I've had experience with is the Aver EH5216. I like it a lot. Remote access is quite nice. Maybe a 4-channel variant of this would be good. Or a simple eb1304?

He said he's going with both: Color/make/model/dents etc are great for evidentiary reasons, but not they won't lead you directly to the bad guy unless they get the image on TV and someone recognizes the car. I like the approach of going with the professional cam for LPR and the WDR box cam for vehicle description. What DVR would you recommend? I personally would lean toward a unit with good remote access capabilities so that there are multiple neighbors who can recover video if needed. It would suck to have to wait for one neighbor to get back from a trip before you could get the video you need. Oh, and bear in mind that this system only lets you see who came and went. It won't prove they actually did anything, even if they are the only car that entered the area at the time or a break-in. It would give the police a lead to follow up on to go have a friendly chat with someone, but don't expect a search warrant based solely on this footage.

Theft is definitely a risk. I'm thinking it can be installed discreetly though, because it is small and dark. If you install it on a pole on its own then it will stick out like a sore thumb. If you mount it under the mailbox at the back of the pole then it won't be as obvious.

You are pushing the limits of the REG-X then. 15'-25', I believe they are good for. And IIRC North Carolina is a one-plate-state? So southbound cars would not have a front plate to read. You could only read the rear plates from northbound cars. I'd get out there with a tape measure and make sure that the rear plate of northbound cars is well within 25' of the post, even if the car is driving on it's own side of the road rather than dead center. Does this neighbor have a mailbox you can mount the cam to instead of a seperate post? That would put it at a nice height, allow it to blend in a little, and put it as close to the road as possible for a closer read.

Two bad cameras? He did say it started out with a good image and got worse over time.

That pretty much narrows it down to the cabling run... From post #1 That pretty much excludes the cabling run. Back to square 1.

It's still very 'noisy' all day long. I'd reset it to factory defaults and see if that fixes it. If not, take the cam down and power it from a wall wart and run it into a TV or something. If it's still bad, the cam should go back under warranty.

The Bosch Application Guide for the REG-X camera (http://stna.resource.bosch.com/documents/REG-XClose-rang_ApplicationReference_enUS_T6006569227.pdf) says that you must maintain the following: 1) The angle that the camera looks down at must be less than 40deg 2) The angle that the camera loos across the road must also be less than 40deg 3) The width of the plate must be at least 18% of the width of the screen 4) If all these are true, then it should read at up to 50mph. So try this: Bring up google map satellite pic of the street. Draw a line that is 35deg from the direction of travel for a car in the center of the road to the mounting post. Measure that distance. Is within the capture range of the camera? Using a professional LPR will let you use more extreme angles and capture faster vehicles than a home-grown solution.

Yeah, he did say that. However I figured he meant the color noise was the same even when the car is stationary, as he mentioned it looked the same on the spot monitor and you won't see interlacing on a spot monitor. Plus... If it looks like interlacing, waddles like interlacing and quacks like interlacing...

OK, so the jagged effect around the car is interlacing. Now we just need to figure out whatever looks like high gain noise. I'd like to see a pic from this camera at noon. I wonder ho dark it was at 8:10am. Thursday 8:10am on my cam shows it was darker than noon but not dark enough to give the camera a problem. This is a fixed iris cam.

I feel sorry for that neighbor - any car going to his house would not be captured! If you go with a professional LPR camera it will tolerate the angle better and could shoot towards the main road. You don't need the full width of the 16' road because most license plates are in the center of the car - and those that are on one side tend to be on the driver's side. That saves you 2' either side. My thoughts: You can do some math based upon the average speed of cars, the amount of distance they would travel while covered by the camera and the framerate... That tells you how many frames the car will be in shot for. If you can give us actual distances then we can calculate the focal length of the lens you would need.

This is where your experience trumps mine. I look at that jagged edges around that car and I only see interlacing caused by a moving car. Note that the snow on the ground under the car does not show the same effect, it's only the movable object that shows the effect. Also note that the jagged edges are lined up perfectly as if the odd and even lines are from images taken a split-second apart. The edges of the odd lines all line up where I'd expect them to, same for the even lines. You are clearly seeing something that my untrained eyes don't. Having said that, if I am correct that it is interlacing effect, then this will not be seen on a spot monitor or on a stationary car. OP, Can you post a cam image of that area without the car. If the ground shows the same jagged effect then it's definitely a camera/lens thing. If that area is not jagged then that would be very interesting. The splotchy colors almost look like the effect you get with wavelet compression on a black image.

Its a terrible image. And it is terrible for a few reasons. Just wondering which of those reasons we should focus on.

Here's a shot from my system that is about the same angle & focal length. Camera is a Panvigor IR vandal dome 3.6mm. Cat5e/passive baluns.

I can't explain why the car would look like that if it was not moving. Typically that effect come from the fact that at full D1 resolution each single "frame" is made up of two "fields" (one field comprises all the odd-numbered horizontal lines, and the other field is made up from the even-numbered lines). The two fields are scanned one after the other, so any movement will show up as those jagged edges as the object has moved slightly between the odd field and the even field. I have to believe that in your example picture the car was moving at the time because it is the only thing showing the interleave effect. The hose, house and other non-movable object s all look solid. If you are getting the interleave effect on the car when ther car is parked then you have a problem I've never seen before. I would ask you to post another pic taken at noon with the car parked there, see if the extra light makes the image less gain-noisey. I wonder if there is a setting in the camera that is forcing it to use too much gain, as stated before.

If the post is out of the right-of-way and there's no reasonble risk of a car hitting it then it can be as big as you want. You can get metal pipe from a welding supply house. I'd check out the cost of stainless versus regular steel so you don't have to keep painting it. The higher the cameras are mounted, the more solid the pole needs to be. Something 3" pipe sunk 3' into the ground in concerete with conduit run underground and up into the pipe for the wiring. Personally, if other people are relying on this too I'd be more inclined to go with a true engineered license plate camera from Extreme or similar rather than a home grown solution. My LP setup took years of tinkering to get to about a 98% capture rate - although that is a single lane where the cars are travelling at less than 10mph. And I still get curveballs every now and then (see my printed plate thread!) Also, the lens... I'm using a 82.5mm lens to read the width of a single car at 50'. Your 50mm lens will mean you need to be pretty close. Also, bear in mind the effetc if interlacing - I got better results when the plate moves top to bottom rather than side to side. I have the camera mounted on the front of my house looking directly down the driveway where cars appraoch it directly. When I had the camera mounted to the side of the driveway I found the interlacing effect caused the plates to be too blurry. Is there a curve in the road where youcan mount the camera to the outside of the curve? If you are running analog then you need one cam per lane. The cam will be aimed at the center of the lane. I get best results when the image is just a little less than the width of the car (so both headlights are partially out of shot and the LP is dead center) Even then the LP is about 100 pi Example 1: Plate is ~75 pixels wide. Any less than this and the plate would not be readable. Example 2: Bottom right image has the plate ~160 pixels wide. So for a good read you need to aim for the plate to be 75 px wide at the very least. 100 is better. But the wider the plate appears, the more cameras you need to cover it. It's just a tradeoff. If it was me, I would set up a temp camera wide enough to cover the whole lane, set up for motion detection. Watch cars entering/exiting the plate capture zone for a few days and use that to get an understaning of how wide you REALLY need to cover. You may find that 99% of the plates pass through the most central 10'

What part of the image is bothering you? - The moving car is an interlacing issue - either switch to CIF or look for a deinterlace option on playback. - The weird/false color patterns in the trees... What time of day was this pic taken. Was is twilight out? A camera can create a noisy image if it is using too much gain to overcome darkness. - Can't read the plate - You won't not with that camera/angle.

i only use white coax No pink?

if u want to wait few days I will do few shots if my GN605 is working and show u all possible light combinations I already ordered this camera. Even if the negative funtion does not help, the WDR will be a huge improvement over my existing camera. I would definitely still be interested in seeing your results, though, as I don't have easy access to a printed plate.

Outside of the CCTV aspects, I would add that you should probably research the DOT limit for how strong a roadside post can be. When you install a wooden post for a mailbox it needs to be 4x4 or less to reduce the risk of injuries to cars that may drive off the road. Before you install a pole by the side of the road, check with your local roads department and figure out what kind of post you can install and where. I would try to stay out of the right-of-way and have someone volunteer to have the cameras installed on their property instead.

Box cam is exactly what I need. I already have the enclosure and perfect lens (82.5mm with 52mm threading for the 850nm IR pass filter) working with the current SuperCircuits PC-23C camera.