Stationary License Plate Reading

Thanks for the corroborating feedback!

I’d love it if this were simply a firmware issue, but I have my doubts…

I appreciate your input.

…even if you ARE just a snarky robot.

Reality is that you likely would need a 4K camera to recover a license plate any much beyond point blank range.

 

Which “Reality”?

Most “business grade high definition” cameras, used in situations where reading a license plate is needed, like parking lots, are 1080P.

Hardly 4K.

The main problem I’ve seen for reading license plates is the IR filter doesn’t filter the headlights or taillights and they will blow out the picture at night.

Blink cameras do this and are crapy for even recognizing the type of auto at night because the lights are too bright.

During the daytime it shouldn’t be a problem. Most quality dash cams are not 4K and do a fine job reading license plates.

Something else must be causing the blur. I have gotten security and trail cameras that weren’t properly focused at the factory.

I’ll have to experiment with my v2 which is currently not in a place to read license plates. Only the front door.

Indeed! My 1080p dash cam picks up license plates just fine, but my reality is probably not like yours…

So, I took a picture of a motorcycle plate at 10 yards. The picture was 1.5 Mb.

The motorcycle license plate is smaller than an automobile plate and it was unreadable. Even when I know the plate number and even when it was zoomed to 800%. Much blurring.

Tomorrow, I’ll do the same with an auto plate, but I’m beginning to be suspicious the camera is actually 1080P. Plates should be clearer at only 30 feet.

I’ll also try to get a picture from the dash cam in my truck which I know is 1080P.

I suspect this has more to do with the heavy compression applied to the video stream rather than the native resolution of the camera. But without any way to change the quality/compression level of the video stream we can’t tell what the hardware is capable of. I’ve also seen plenty of cheap “1080p” cameras (1080p-capable sensor) with small/poor optics that have less detail than a 720p camera with good optics.

Wyze Team, care to comment on hardware capability vs firmware limitation? Maybe a native uncompressed video stream? I would love to see options for higher bitrates for local recordings instead of just “SD/HD”, but from what I understand the Wyze team may be somewhat limited by what the OEM hardware supports.

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This morning I took a picture of my truck at 25 feet.

I was able to load the picture into Picasa, zoom to 400% and the license number (Arizona) was readable even though the pixel count across the plate was approximately only 40.

The compression should be less, and the camera should record the best picture/video as the sensor can record, when saving to local storage and recording pictures/videos. I can understand the need to do heavy compression to keep files small for cloud storage.

The whole point of a security camera is to get a good picture of what’s going on. Viewing from the cloud is just an added luxury, but is not relied on when getting good, recognizable photos you can show to LEOs.

If say, someone steals my bike off the porch, I will most likely notice within a couple days and I can grab the video before the SSD card rewrites older videos. So heavy compression for videos is not a needed capability for local storage.

Apparently, the photos will be clearer since they are saved as lossless png file at 1.5 Mbs.

Heavy compression is not needed for local storage.

After trying several things this morning I’m at the conclusion that the sensor just isn’t up to the task at hand and any license plate over 30 feet away will become unreadable. Changing from SD to HD doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Wow, a lot of feedback so far.

I wonder if Wyze has any input? Or is this just a case of getting what you pay for?

Excellent analysis and suggestion, Wayne. C’mon WYZEcam. Here’s a tweak that really makes sense. I don’t need 2 week storage. I DO need good resolution. Gwen?

p.s. Oh how you underestimate my kind. How smart (do u suppose), a robot has 2b to check a box…

[image removed – contained profanity]

julianstan summoned me! Though perhaps we should put in stricter methods for restricting robot access? :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m gonna send this over to people that are more tech involved in the company. I’ll also add the feature requests in here to our tracker (such as local storage without the compression). :slight_smile:

Hey everyone! Gwen (WyzeCracker) asked me to take a look at this and see what info I could provide.

It might be difficult to give a accurate answer without seeing your particular use case, so I’m going to request that you send a sample image of what you are seeing into our support (https://www.wyzecam.com/wyze-support/) and let me know the ticket number here I will be happy to make sure you are getting taken care of.

I did check with my own camera and found that after about 15’ feet it became hard for me to tell the license plate number and anything further than that was either hidden by glare from the sun or just to far away. It is worth mentioning that this camera was designed for indoor use. The IR blasters are rated for 30 feet, so I would say this is about the maximum range which is perfect for most indoor situations, such as a living room, hallway, or garage (which is where I currently have mine setup). On that note, we are working on an outdoor solution. I will make sure that I pass this use case up to the Devs since this may be a limitation of the current indoor version’s hardware (I do not currently have more information on an outdoor unit, just that its coming! I know how popular that request is).

Thanks in advance!

Looking to see if there’ll be an improved Wyze Cam model that would be able to capture street traffic (for me distance would be 50-75’ range… i’m at the bottom of a cul-de-sac) with enough resolution that license plate details are legible.

thx

I’ll add the request to the list! We would need to make this an outdoor camera with longer range use ability. I don’t know if we’re working on that for this round (since first we need to figure out an outdoor camera). :slight_smile:

One of my neighbor came by asking if I can check the recording to see if license plate of thief’s car was captured. Unfortunately, even though the car & thief were captured, the license plate wasn’t clearly visible when I tried to zoom. Is it possible to improve the clarity of zoom with existing hardware?
I think this will really help a lot of them.

Here’s the Roadmap topic that you can hop over and vote for (click the VOTE button at the top):

I have tried to set up a “parked cam” inside on my dash to monitor my condo garage for vandalism attempts.
Unfortunately there is an issue with the cams ability to record to SD while off of wifi after 2 hours.
That being said, I can attest that the camera can barely read the plates of the cars parked in spots directly in front of me , approx a car length away

Anyone been able to implement ALPR(Automatic License Plate Recognition) on Wyze Cams? I have a metal mailbox so I decided to test using mine to read license plates going by my mailbox. For my test, I used the free version of OpenALPR which retains the passing reports that are generated for 2 days, but you can integrate it into your own API to keep then longer. The Wyze cam fit really well on my mailbox and I thought it would have a good enough view of the passing plates for the API to read them, but this is where I was wrong. Before I flashed the v2 I was using with custom firmware to use RTSP, I wanted to make sure I could read the plates just from the Wyze app. I COULDN’T AT ALL! They just looked like splotches of ink. If anyone has any advice on how to combat this please let me know!

Did you ever get very far on this?