Which Device for License Plate Recognition?

wasauce

Hello!

What an amazing set of products the Luxonis/DepthAI team has built. I’m so excited about what you are making easy!

I have a question about which product I should buy — and I’d love your input please.

Goal: I want to do license plate and car recognition — on device.

The hardware will be ₅₀ feet away from where the cars stop at a stop sign.

In looking through the offerings -- I am trying to understand which device the DepthAI/Luxonis thinks would be best.

Two options:

Option 1: DepthAI: USB3C + RPI HQ Camera

https://shop.luxonis.com/products/rpi-hq-camera-imx477-adapter-kit
https://shop.luxonis.com/collections/all/products/depthai-usb3-edition

If I went this route, a few questions:

Q1: Do I need to have a RPI HQ Camera -- or would I be able to add a different lens to the 1x Color 12MP Modular Camera? If I can add a lens - what would you recommend?

Q2: Does the DepthAI: USB3C offer the same vehicle / license plate detection that I see offered here:

Option 2: OpenCV AI Kit (OAK)

First -- I'm very impressed with OAK!

Q1: If I went this route, am I able to add a different lens to the OAK-1 or OAK-D?
Q2: Which OAK device would you recommend? In reading the feature differences -- it looks like the OAK-1 might be better for my use case.

Thank you so much for creating this products!

Brandon

Hi @wasauce !

Thanks for your interest and great questions!

In terms of the model to use, so vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0106 returns the bounding box of the vehicle and also the license plate. You can run it via here:

https://docs.luxonis.com/tutorials/openvino_model_zoo_pretrained_model/#trying-other-models

So OAK-1 and OAK-D can have additional lenses put in front of the color camera, for example an Occipital lens is here:

That said, I think using the RPi HQ camera with the BW1098FFC + Pi Camera Adapter is probably the way to go with your application.

You can buy these here.

And although I don't know which lens to use for your application... with the Pi camera you can use effectively any lens on Earth... so it gives great capabilities to have the right field of view and zoom for this detection.

Speaking of which, check this out: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-used-for-out-of-this-world-astrophotography

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Brandon

wasauce

Brandon

Thank you for the reply!

I think you are right and had been leaning towards the RPI HQ with the BW1098FFC.

The added bonus being that seems purchasable now with an earlier delivery date -- as compared to the OAKs. That being said -- I just might have to also back the OAK project -- and have a little holiday present 🙂

Thank you for taking the time to dive into this and post the image. I had seen that RPI HQ camera project -- how cool!

Bill

Brandon

Thanks @wasauce ! Appreciate support on both and as usual feel free to ping us at any time. Also if of interest we do have luxonis-community.slack.com for more real-time communication.

Thanks again,
Brandon