My homeowners association in the Seattle suburbs has recently experienced repeated catalytic converter thefts, auto theft, property theft, and property damage, All of these criminals drive into our subdivision in order to be able to make a hasty exit. Unfortunately, the video from all our WYZE/Ring/Blink/Nest… cameras can’t ID these troublemakers because we can’t see the plates from a side view and the cars appear too small with our wide angle cameras.
As a machine vision engineer, I routinely work on challenging manufacturing applications of cameras, optics, and lighting.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelson-bridwell-4ab07357/
Looking at the Wyze Cam v3, I genuinely believe that it can, with trivial modifications, be turned into an effective and remarkably inexpensive 24x7 tool for capturing images of license plates.
The strategy would be to mount cameras on homes located at strategic T intersections in our subdivision where they have a clear view of the fronts and rears of every car as it slows down to make a turn. Wiring these cameras for power can be cheap because all of our homes come with exterior roofline outlets for Christmas lights. Some homes may need to add a WiFi repeater to provide a stronger external signal for the camera.
The required field of view would be about 30 feet wide at a distance of 85 feet from the roofline of the house, or a horizontal viewing angle of about 20 degrees. This can be accomplished by the simple substitution of a ~16mm M12 screw-in lens for the standard 1.5mm? M12 fisheye lens. With this lens a 12" by 6" plate would take up 128x64 pixels, which is large enough to easily be able to read plates at 85 feet.
At night time, with the NIR lights turned on, license plates, which have a bright 3M retroreflective coating, appear overexposed and totally white, even from 100 feet away. Consequently, the only other trivial change would be a software option to set a maximum limit on the exposure time. This shorter exposure time can guarantee that plates will never be overexposed at night,
With these changes, after a crime occurs we can check the cameras for vehicle traffic and send images of the plates to our police in order to help them narrow down their search and take repeat offenders off the street.
In a few years perhaps WYZE will be able to add OCR software that can locate and automatically read plate numbers, but we have a very immediate need that these trivial updates (insert a different lens into some cameras, add exposure time limit) would address.
[Mod Note]: Your request was merged to this topic for consistency in grouping similar requests. You may also wish to comment on and/or vote for License Plate OCR. Remember to scroll up to the top and click the VOTE button.