Ever wonder how you get those speeding or toll both traffic violation tickets in the mail? Small, automated camera technologies are big players in the world of license plate recognition (LPR). LPR cameras provide a clean look at your plates even when you haven’t been to the car wash in ages. InterTest Inc. has been working closely with customers to develop accurate and resource-minimizing LPR board-level cameras for license plate reads in all kinds of conditions.
A major challenge in LPR is using a single camera to recognize various license plate characters in different environments. For instance, it might be easy to set a camera to read a clean, dirt-free plate. But that same camera setting would have difficulty in reading the same plate if it were covered in dirt or soot. It is possible to send commands to the camera to constantly change shutter and illumination settings to adjust to each plate, but that drastically burdens the resources of the camera processor. To overcome these LPR challenges, the new, sequential shutter mode was developed. This allows one camera to automatically and constantly change shutter speeds without utilizing commands from the processor. This gives an LPR camera the ability to differentially read clean and dirty license plates.
Testing is proving to be super satisfactory with board-level cameras making the final camera units smaller and the final images crisper!