Dedicated License Plate Cam project

[nayr]

actually I realized it was pulling main stream not substream so that was a 3MP image lol

gave it a 720p 30FPS stream and I was sitting at:

%Cpu(s):[B] 32.8 [/B]us,[B]  1.7 [/B]sy,[B]  0.0 [/B]ni,[B] 62.9 [/B]id,[B]  0.9 [/B]wa,[B]  0.0 [/B]hi,[B]  1.7 [/B]si,[B]  0.0 [/B]st

load average was about 1.0 on a dual cpu vm, I have plenty of spare power because host box was:

last pid: 86229;  load averages:  2.56,  2.44,  2.03                                                                                                                                                                  
up 63+20:47:52  21:41:21150 processes: 2 running, 140 sleeping, 8 zombie
CPU:  4.4% user,  0.0% nice, 21.9% system,  0.7% interrupt, 73.0% idle
Mem: 514M Active, 1032M Inact, 11G Wired, 437M Cache, 141M Free
ARC: 5811M Total, 623M MFU, 2747M MRU, 16M Anon, 2452M Header, 281M Other
Swap: 8192M Total, 1421M Used, 6770M Free, 17% Inuse

Thats acceptable to me, but your right does need a bit of cpu cycles... I checked the latest image and the timestamp was just a few seconds before I killed the daemon so its keeping up but this wont be running on my lil arm box thats for sure.

 

[pozzello]

hm, the image posted is 3MP, not D1. I'm confused, i guess...

edit: nm, looks like you figured it out...
a bit much for a raspberry pi too, i think.

 

[nayr]

yeah, if you wanted to go low enough power like that you might be better off with my plan of offloading motion detection to the camera and having a script watch a folder for new MJPEG's and run them through ALPR.. at least this way the RPi or whatever would not really need to keep up in real time and could go through them at its own pace.. an RPi2 with its quad core might be able to cope with the load.

I'll explore it a bit I would like to reduce the requirements, the code would be pretty damn simple as they already have a bunch of api modules.. It'll require the motion detection on HuniSun PTZ to be reliable enough to get the plates to my FTP Server.. but I feel alot better knowing that I should be able to get this all to work despite all the limitations of that camera.

 

[steve457]

I like your idea of monitoring a folder for incoming MJPEG's. Do you know if FTP'ing videos on motion could be accomplished using the 2032? As far as I know only JPEGs could be sent over FTP on motion. Looking at the settings on my other cameras I'm not clear exactly how I could set them up to send video.

 

[pozzello]

good point, Nayr. I'll play around with my Pi and a low-rez feed from BI, which can easily dump only motion-detected mjpeg pulled from the cam's secondary stream...

 

[vincenttor]

i have tried the : http://www.videoanalitika.lt/en/index.html sofware
and this eats cpu.
constant draw of 45 % in a i5 quad core with a 3Mp camera

 

[nayr]

no idea about the 2032 motion ftp capabilities, I just presumed it could because its a pretty common feature (all my dahuas can).. probably should check to see if the hunisun is capable too

 

[ColBogey]

Would these old Bosch cameras still be useful? I'd eventually like to get one set up to cover our parking lot.

 

[nayr]

I would not bother wasting your time or money with Analogue technology anymore, the only thing useful on that beast might be the IR spotlight since it looks pretty damn beefy

 

[pozzello]

might be useful to someone, but they are not IP cams...

 

[pozzello]

nayr, you mentioned picking up a Huisun PTZ, but (i think) they don't support pulling an mjpeg stream (h.264 only), so how would you do that?

 

[nayr]

you couldent, good catch.. just watched a video of someone going through the config and it wont output anything other than 1080p h264, so its pretty much worthless for OpenALPR IMHO.

well shit.. I'll keep looking but if I find a decent 50mm camera for under $150 this project is going back on the shelf.

 

[pozzello]

well, as I mentioned, i'm pretty sure i can get BI to provide an mjpeg stream somehow.
i mean that's pretty much how it's web UI works (for non-IE browsers), so i it should be do-able.
my huisun should be here this week, so i'll try to get set up to test that out...

 

[nayr]

yeah since your running BI thats still an option for you, but BI is going to have to transcode that x264 to MJPEG so there went your lower power usage.. seems like going to have to pay the CPU toll at one end or the other... can you setup BI to process the x264 for motion and then transcode only motion to MJPEG and dump it for ALPR to pickup? that would be better than a constant transcode.

MJPEG obviously just a bunch of JPEG's so OpenALPR dont have to really do any additional decoding other than trying to keep up with the stream.. my VM would have to transcode the x264 to MJPEG and I suspect thats going to send the load to unacceptable levels.. I think the most I am willing to sacrifice was one of my 6 3GHz cores on my nas.. and even that I would like to reduce dramatically if possible.

I would like to avoid paying a couple hundred dollars a year in electricity just to process license plates, id rather put that money into the camera and have the data collection happen at the most efficient power levels I can realistically obtain... I am already recording 5 1080p or greater cameras at under 7w, so adding one more to the mix and blowing all that work away makes me hesitant.

I am very interested in seeing your results, I am going to try my new Dahua PTZ thats on its way out front for license plates coming out of the culdesac, but obviously that wont be a dedicated ALPR camera so its going to be pretty much blind at night.

I found some 6-60mm varifocal lenses for cameras cheap on ALiBaba, but finding camera housings that will take them is not that easy.. I would not mind building or modifying camera if I had to, Guess I'll keep looking through cheap 720p IPC's and maby I'll run across one.

 

[pozzello]

it shouldn't be "a couple hundred dollars a year in electricity". @12.5 cents per Kwh (california average residential rate), that's 1600KWh/yr, or an incremental 180 watts ongoing.
i don't think transcoding one stream + openalpr on it will be THAT expensive, but will report when i've got some more concrete data...

 

[steve457]

it shouldn't be "a couple hundred dollars a year in electricity". @12.5 cents per Kwh (california average residential rate), that's 1600KWh/yr, or an incremental 180 watts ongoing.
i don't think transcoding one stream + openalpr on it will be THAT expensive, but will report when i've got some more concrete data...

It depends on how many watts a dedicated computer system would use that is on 24x7. I know that my ancient Quad 2 duo processor alone draws around 95W. Even the newer more efficient processors draw around 65W I believe. So say your overall computer system draws 70W. 70W x 24 hours * 365 days / 1000= 613.2 kW/h. While electricity at the lower tier I believe is right around $0.14 per kwh, the higher tier is around $0.35 per kwh. So you cost can range anywhere between 613.w*0.14 = $85 on the low end to 613.2*0.35 = $214.20 on the higher end. So in summary, a couple of hundred dollars a years to run a dedicated server is fairly accurate .

 

[pozzello]

sure, but not if you've already got a server set up and are just adding one or two stream re-encodings and open alpr post-processing.
sorry of that wasn't clear...

 

[steve457]

sure, but not if you've already got a server set up and are just adding one or two stream re-encodings and open alpr post-processing.
sorry of that wasn't clear...

True, if you already have a server on 24x7 then the incremental cost would be low. In my instance I already have an Ubuntu server running 24x7 so would just leverage that system. The question for me is whether I would need to upgrade to an i5 or i7 processor, but won't know until I start testing to see the impact of the load on the system.

 

[nayr]

well in my situation my NAS/VM Server is not horribly efficient, its a 3Ghz 6 core Phenom with a ton of disks shoved into it.. but it does pretty damn good at idle and thats where it spends most of its time.. but when I got 4 transcoding events going on in plex that power usage skyrockets, its only on occasion it sees those loads.. but it saves me from a cable/satellite bill so I never cared how much power it chewed.. all my running VM's are pretty low load and this would be the highest by far, I mostly use its idle power to spin up development sandboxes and testing environments for research and work.

it would not be sitting at idle mostly anymore if I got 2 of the 6 cores pegged 24/7/365.. I think just the cpu can suck up well over 100w on its own when loaded down.. it was the black edition or whatever that could be used to heat a small dorm durring gaming sessions.. its actually water cooled so I can run my server room a bit warmer in the summer w/out AC .. When I made this server years ago this was really the best performance bang for the buck, but power consumption was very poor.

I'd plug a kill-o-watt into it and get some real numbers but my uptime is fucking awesome right now and im not touching shit.

 

[nayr]

Digging about I think I may have found something that'll work.. wha'd u guys think?
http://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/bRmf22Xq
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/1-3-6mm-60mm-Varifocal-Auto-Iris-Zoom-CCTV-Security-Camera-CS-mount-Lens-View-Angle/1782359109.html

Tha'd run me merely $87 shipped and I could still use SmartPSS for managing it on my Mac so tha'd be nice.. I could also get a 100mm lens and it'd run me just over $100 shipped.. with that kinda zoom I could put it up on the roof further back where a big box camera housing would be more discrete.

here is a sample video, not too shabby really:
my biggest concern is if it has WDR, my understanding that is pretty damn helpful for LPR.. it might have it, I cant find a PDF for this specific model but other 2100 series 720p Dahuas have DWDR.