License plate camera cannot see printed plates (vs stamped)

[Scruit 0]

My house has a license plate camera that I put together myself. It's a BW camera with an auto-iris lens, IR filter and IR emitter. The plate occupies about 15% of the screen and I get about a 98% catch rate - the only ones I miss are if the plate if covered.

 

Just today I failed to capture a plate and there was no good reason to miss it. As I looked closer I saw that the license plate on the car was printed, not stamped. The IR cut filter on the lens removes basically all visible light, so I can't see the color variations. Although I can see stamped plates just fine (the shadows cast by the stamped letters, etc) these new style printer plates appear as completely white.

 

Anyone got any advice on how to catch those? Or am I looking at returning to using visible light rather that IR (and going back to the same issues I had before with headlights blinding the camera at night, etc)

 

 

All I can think to try is to mount a second camera that uses visible light only, and hope that either one of the two cameras gets a good read.

[zmxtech 0]

You are correct a second "overview" camera aimed at the same choke point.

-you can have a exit camera also, good for when the sun does funky things.