DVR Integration

[bigdavelamb 0]

Hi, I am new to the forum and fairly new to CCTV. I am a software developer and I have been asked to develop some software that stores images of vehicles by number plate. I thought the best method maybe to use a standard DVR to store the images captured by the cameras, then retrieve the images on the DVR and use a 3rd party application to query the images and pull the number plates, basically a client will give me a number plate I then need to be able to retrieve the image from the DVR. To be a bit clearer, a vehicle will stop at our stop sign, pictures will be taken of the vehicle so I will have a consist image of each vehicle.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on methodologies on this?

 

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

 

Dave

[scorpion 0]

What is the latest on your project so far?

[501 0]

geovsion has software for this.

[CollinR 0]

geovsion has software for this.

 

Ditto, assuming you have a standard for set for plates.

[bigdavelamb 0]

Hi there, thanks for that, I have been looking at the Geovision product, unfortunately I would have to use their software which does not run as a windows service it runs as a standard application, which is not ideal, do you know of any other products?

 

Dave

[rory 0]

Hi there, thanks for that, I have been looking at the Geovision product, unfortunately I would have to use their software which does not run as a windows service it runs as a standard application, which is not ideal, do you know of any other products?

 

Dave

Why do you want it to run as a service?

[bigdavelamb 0]

We are supplying boxed solutions to clients, which also will have our own bespoke software which does some additional stuff, I cannot supply clients with a Windows server running applications as it looks unprofessional.

[Daryl733 0]

Nope. From what you describe, using dvr to store images and then use ur box to pull them out won't be a good solution imho.

You'll be better off implementing some frame capturing hardware.

IF you use DVR, it'll be hard to determine which frame has the license plate on it.

You'll have to determine which frames contain the car license plates, and the best frame to recognised the plate from. Hard to retreive that from the DVR unless you'r able to program that into the dvr as well. Most low end dvr doesn't have that capability except video motion detection, sensor triggering. Might not be enough.

And using higher end dvr to do that might not justify the cost.

[Daryl733 0]

Nope. From what you describe, using dvr to store images and then use ur box to pull them out won't be a good solution imho.

You'll be better off implementing some frame capturing hardware.

IF you use DVR, it'll be hard to determine which frame has the license plate on it.

You'll have to determine which frames contain the car license plates, and the best frame to recognised the plate from. Hard to retreive that from the DVR unless you'r able to program that into the dvr as well. Most low end dvr doesn't have that capability except video motion detection, sensor triggering. Might not be enough.

And using higher end dvr to do that might not justify the cost.

[bigdavelamb 0]

Hi Daryl,

 

THanks for the post. This is one of the issues I have been debating, one reason we were going down the DVR road was Windows and frame grabbing cards may well be a bit flaky and prone to the occasional crash as we all know windows likes to crash now and again. We were thinking using a ready made DVR is pretty much 100% stable.

 

1. Car drives in

2. Input / Alarm fired:

2.1 Starts cameras and DVR records images

2.2 Fires ANPR software to scan image on APNR dedicated camera

3. DVR stores image by time / date / Input Alarm ID

4. Our software stores Input Alarm ID with number plate

 

As long as the DVR can store the alarmID and our system can store this same ID along with the number plate we will be OK.

 

However as you suggest this solution may well be unworkable. I am at the moment still looking into it.

 

Dave

[CollinR 0]

What you guys are asking is pointless.

 

1. There is no LPR embedded DVR.

2. If you must build an LPR application to interface with embedded DVR you will do this with what?

 

Embedded systems have nowhere near the balls to scan and compress video in realtime. Maybe you are okay with a nightly batch job??? Still you would need to develop the embedded solution for that.

 

Basically you won't have a 100% RTOS no matter what you do.

 

Keep in mind most embedded DVRs today aren't RTOS anyway so the stability concerns aren't nearly as valid as they could be.

 

You can make Geovision run as a service. There is no reason for your end user to ever see or interact with the Windows desktop. The LPR data is pumped to an MSACCESS database, you can access the video feeds from ActiveX. The machine can run headless as an appliance, I have many in service for many years that have never "locked up" or "Frozen". I use RDP to do service calls, problems come from HDs and power supplies. Which are basically same:same with the embedded competition.

 

Further you could embed Geovision, still not RTOS though.

[Daryl733 0]

You might consider an IP Camera or just utilised the network feature of the DVR.

Use the email notification feature of the dvr and ip cameras to send out a image (ftp or email) to ur server when the sensor attached to the camera is triggered.

Then ur server would just run it's plate recognised algorithm on the image uploaded. think that'll be simpler.

But get a IP cam that accept sensor input and also interchangable lense in order to get a good image. You might want to consider using a photoelectric sensor beam accross the drive in to trigger the image capture at a specific spot. Embeddeding pressure sensor wire would be better, but think that'll require too much work.