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Back to the future Innovative license plate recognition technology and a customer focus are proving to be a successful combination Words | Mate Kiss-Gyorgy, Asura Technologies, Hungary
We live in an era where the customer is truly king; not even niche technology providers or manufacturers have the luxury to leave their customers to sink or swim after purchasing their products. Competition is fierce and companies who fail to listen to their audience are quick to fall. At least this is how it should be, but in truth, there are industries where this shift seems still a long way away – and the license plate recognition (LPR) industry is one of them. Why, you ask? The reason is simple: most technology providers do not regard integrators as customers. Rather they are considered developers, who have the means, personnel, time and resources to develop their LPR application from scratch. Which could not be further from the truth.
Change is on the horizon Up until now, the customer-oriented IT evolution of the past decade has avoided the LPR industry, but that is about to change. Typically, an integrator purchases the optical character recognition (OCR) engine and from that point on, they are left alone. This is the reason why integrators need creativity, time and lots of patience to learn
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to use these products. Support is limited and no warranties are included – application programming interface (API) sample codes are provided but, unfortunately, in most cases, they will not get you a working LPR system. The advantage of such a setup is flexibility in terms of usage, yet the integrator needs to do lots of system development. Why? An engine module is usually capable of processing one image at a time and returns the result in the memory (RAM) or as a database entry. Several critical functions also need to be added. These include parsing the stream of the image source (IP camera), filtering irrelevant images to obtain reasonable and affordable resources, loading and processing images, implementing the
thread handling and license optimization, managing and validating events, and finally implementing a database solution.
A long time in the making Developing an application with all these features takes years, even for OCR software providers. It takes several years of work of 10 full-time developers to deliver just such a high-efficiency LPR solution Furthermore, the licensing model of such a solution will not match the integrator’s business model. Thread/CPU core-based licensing is unpredictable: too many variations for processing time and too many images handled per event. To make it failsafe, the technology provider will set up a costlier than necessary system, taking the worst-case scenario as the basis of their calculation. An increasingly popular way to integrate LPR is to purchase cameras mounted with LPR software. Integrators choosing this option usually face performance and cost issues.
Saving setup costs and system design With smart design, a high-end CPU computer is capable of processing the footage of 16 cameras, in some cases even more. If image
