Thread: Automatic Number Plate Recognition (anpr)

Originally Posted by Greeno2k8

Why would you want to know the reg's of all the undercover police cars?

j

I would guess, so you could rcognise them. Provided you have excellent eye sight and could see them before they see you.

no, his idea was to have a program running in conjunction with a webcam to auto detect and alert to police cars.

1. I don't know a web cam with decent enough quality for this to work well

2. seems like a LOT of work for VERY little gain

3. you could never be certain that the database was 100% up to date.

4. why not just use a regular radar/laser/whatever detector?

5. how about just driving like a sane person?

It's impossible to have a database of undercover police cars, actually.
Coming from an undercover cop, I know the cars are registered to the undercover aliases and are no different than any other vehicle registration.

Now, it's possible you could compile a list of unmarked police vehicles, which are a whole other matter entirely.

Just for laughs... Here is a Perl script that I run while taking photos of plates that looks for images/screenshots from my camera and runs them through the JavaANPR application and records my current GPS location with a date and time stamp. I execute this script from the \javaanpr\dist folder. You will need ActiveState ActivePerl. You will also need the GPS::NMEA module installed. Just for fun!

## Script for automatic processing of (license plates) number plates from a CarPC camera using JavaANPR and a GPS unit


## Location of image captures jpg or png files
$path = 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\UserName\\My Documents\\My Pictures\\';

## Destination to place images processed by javaanpr
$pathdest = 'C:\\Plates\\';

## File ext. to search for
$fileextwewant = "png";

## GPS module
use GPS::NMEA;

## Connect to our GPS device
my $gps = GPS::NMEA->new(Port => 'COM4', # or COM5: or ev/ttyS0 Baud => 4800);




while (1) {

## Check every two seconds for a new image
sleep(2);

## Open the folder containing the images
opendir (DIR, "$path") or die "Couldn't open directory, $!";

## Get a list of the files in the folder and place the list in a array
@file = readdir DIR;
$lengthoflist = @file;


## I can count!
$counter = 0;


while ($counter <= $lengthoflist)
{


$fileext = $file[$counter];

## Get the last three chars of the file name (the ext)
$fileext = substr($fileext, -3);

## Check if the file is a file we want to process
if ($fileext eq $fileextwewant) {

## Load the File module for moving the files around
use File::Copy;

## Create the name of the destination folder, it will be the image name with ANPR added to the front
$newfoldername = "ANPR$file[$counter]";
$newfoldernamewithpath = "$pathdest$newfoldername";

## Issue the OS command to make the folder
system("mkdir $newfoldernamewithpath");

## We will now move the file from the screenshot folder to is destination
$oldlocation = "$path$file[$counter]";
$newlocation = "$newfoldernamewithpath\\$file[$counter]";
move($oldlocation, $newlocation);

## Give you something to read while waiting...
print "Processing Image $fileextwewant....\n";

## Call the JavaANPR application to process the image file and generate a report
system("\"C:\\PROGRA~1\\Java\\jre1.6.0_04\\bin\\ja va.exe -jar C:\\javaanpr\\dist\\javaanpr.jar -recognize -i $newlocation -o $newfoldernamewithpath\\\"");

## Call the GPS sub routine to get our current position
&get_gps_position;

## More stuff to read...
print "Processing Complete!\n";



}


$counter++;
}

## Close the folder we opened
closedir DIR;

print "Searching for $fileextwewant files...\n";

}




sub get_gps_position {

## Use the GPS module to get the current GPS position
($ns,$lat,$ew,$lon) = $gps->get_position;


## Get the current date and time
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isd st) = localtime();


$mday = $mday + 1;
$mon = $mon + 1;
$year = $year + 1900;

$gpstxtfilename = "GPSStamp.txt";

## Write the GPS position and date time stamp to a text file in the folder with the javaanpr report
open FILE, ">$newfoldernamewithpath\\$gpstxtfilename" or die $!;
print FILE "Time: $hour:$min.$sec Date: $mday-$mon-$year GPS: $ns $lat $ew $lon\n";
close FILE;


}

will this work in linux?

Yes, this can work on a linux machine. If I am not mistaken most builds of linux come with Perl installed. You will need to install the GPS::NMEA module. You will need to change the path names so they are in the correct format for linux (e.g. / instead of \). The initial GPS::NEMA example I used was from a linux machine. The JavaANPR is a cross-platform application. You will need the Java runtime for linux installed to run the JavaANPR application. Since I am not using any perl modules that are Win32 specific you should be able to get this to work.

GG