Vehicle Damage Recognition System

[JDaniels]

I work for an airport car park and need to provide a vehicle damage monitoring system.
I would need a set of cameras to take digital images of vehicles as they enter and leave a entrance / exit lane.

Do you know of any UK companies that provide this kind of system? Or do you know if there is software available where a car drives in, stops, a number of cameras look at all sides of the car and number plate and store those images?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[JDaniels]

For example

[CAP]

Hi JDaniels. Yes, there is such a company in South Africa that specializes in projects like these. I get to deal with them on a frequent basis. They are called V2D and they have developed our ANPR technology, also recieving the Swedish Science award for previous projects. If you're interested, I can put you in contact with them via their Skype Adress.

[use-IP]

That's an interesting application.

I'm not aware of any ready-made solutions for this, but it shouldn't be that difficult to put a system together. Basically you just need to store a set of images and then be able to index and search those images according to the number plate reads i.e. search for the plate and find video of the vehicle arriving and leaving (with corresponding context views all around it).

Traditional ANPR specialist solutions are still relatively expensive e.g. a basic system to log and index ANPR from the likes of CitySync comes with quite an up-front cost.

A couple of possible solutions come to mind:

Dedicated Micros were working towards building ANPR into their DVRs as an option, this would give you a simple solution using a DVR and multiple analogue cameras. You'd have to size the hard discs for the number of cameras and according to how far back claims might cause you to look; I mention this because I guess some people take very long holidays and you may need to look back months to see the car arriving. Adding JBOD and RAID units to DM DVRs can become expensive. Other DVRs are available, not sure who else is integrating ANPR.

Another option would be to go the Avigilon IP route. They will soon be promoting ANPR with their megapixel cameras. Megapixel will also bring the benefit of more detail from less cameras AND it's likely that it'll be more cost-effective to scale the solution for long duration recording if you use IP cameras and storage.

Of course, in an ideal world, if you want good reference images, I'd like the vehicles captured in consistent white light; just a heads-up that the image quality is likely to be quite dependant on the scene lighting ....

There's a few names and thoughts, feel free to contact me if you'd like further help.