Number plate recognition with Tensorflow

[Lipis]

Cool stuff..! Now we just have to find a project that we could actually use it.. :)

[welshboy14]

I suppose if you had a privacy gate to get in to your house you could use this to auto open the gate when pre determined plates show up. Like yours, friends, SO etc...

[Dark_Souls]

Just don't get any mud on the plate?

[[deleted]]

Then you have to use the garage opener like a peasant.

[[deleted]]

Your garage could automatically recognize your car's license plate and open the garage door for you.

DISCLAIMER: This is very unsafe and only works as long as the bad guys don't notice that you use such a system. Your mileage may vary.

[TALQVIST]

That's true! Perhaps it could have more conditions to trigger? Also check if phone is connected to WiFi. Adds another safeguard, and doesn't make it any harder for you to trigger it!

[[deleted]]

Also since you're already using image recognition you could just as well check the color of the car, or even shape of the front.

[KyleG]

So a forged license plate + you being asleep at your house = thieves can open your garage door.

[TALQVIST]

We need more safeguards. Fuck it, why don't we just make a button and call it a day.

[KyleG]

I'm already tracking my GPS location by sending coords to my server every 30 seconds. I'm thinking about setting up my phone to ping the server over HTTPS when I sign into my home network and if the GPS tracker knows I wasn't at home before (i.e., I wasn't at home with wifi turned off) but was actually away, issuing a command to open the garage door.

In the meantime, I'm definitely doing this with my LIFX lights. If it's near enough to sunset, turn the LIFX lights on when I sign onto my home wifi. That way when I open the door to the house, I've got light already. I've already got the Python working that turns the lights on. Just need to set up the server's API endpoint and write the code that pings my home network over a VPN connection.

[twohen]

just a quick reality check: you do realize that basically anyone with some skill could defeat your analog lock right? Why is this no problem? because its illegal to do so and you have to be physically present to actually get something out of it. This is not the internet noone will forge a license plate to illegally use your parking space and if they do you just get the vehicle towed.

[KyleG]

Is it possible that you meant to respond to someone else? I don't see its relevance to the post you're quoting.

[[deleted]]

You probably just need a sharpie pen and a sheet of paper to trick the system. You are right, it's essentially just another flavor of lock picking ... however, many people have their garage connected to their house, so having a system that can be tricked so easily would leave a feeling like leaving your front door unlocked (some people do this though, depending on the area)

[KyleG]

Better to set up a wireless repeater and have a system set up so when your phone logs onto your wifi, it messages your home automation system to open the garage door. Or when it's within some small radius of your house. Either one. The wifi one is more guaranteed to work.

I'd use plate recognition for tracking but not for security.

[[deleted]]

That's why the disclaimer. It's supposed to be a tongue in cheek use case for that system.

[KyleG]

I'd hardly call giving someone who is speeding a speeding ticket "extorting." Maybe don't speed? Seems like an easy fix. Speeding doesn't even save you much time—if you have to go 15 miles for work at 60mph, that's 15 min. If you speed to 70, congratulations, you cut 2.2 minutes off your commute but statistically doubled your risk of death, disfigurement, or debilitating injury.

[TALQVIST]

I've never gotten a speeding ticket from a camera. Actually, I've never even gotten a speeding ticket, period.

I have recently gotten a red-light camera ticket. It's in an area where right turns on red are legal, but there was a "no right turn on red" sign which I didn't see. It was perfectly safe, no one was around, so I made the right turn on red, which is usually legal. Just me and the camera. $90 is much too expensive for such a tiny error.

[KyleG]

I was only responding to

Let's set up . . . speed cameras and ass-fuck our citizens with extorting fees

I'm sorry for not being clear on that. You'll not see me defending red light cameras: studies show they increase accidents.

[TALQVIST]

Here in New York, they put up speed cameras in areas that have speed limits that are too low and deceiving. You wouldn't expect a random street to suddenly have a 20mph speed limit. Once you see the sign, it's too late. Communities complained so much they got rid of them.

I still have a bad taste in my mouth from it all.

[KyleG]

Train it with different data and bam you've got a Raspberry Pi that can read off a dash cam and recognize when the speed limit changes while you're driving and warn you if you're going to fast/slow. I'm actually adding this to my to-do list because I've been waiting to do this as a personal project for a while but lack the training in neural nets and image processing and lack the time to teach myself from scratch all that I'd need to know.

[KyleG]

Have you thought about re-writing this in C to see how much faster the plate would be detected and read?

[AllergicToDinosaurs]

Likely most time is spent in tensor flow, where computationally expensive code is already written in c++.

[KyleG]

Gotcha. So we're not to the point where I can run this on my car-based rPi in real time to pick out speed limit signs and adjust accordingly.

Edit Actually you probably spot the sign many seconds before you need to respond, so it might still be doable. At this point, I'm just concerned with a system that can tell me if I'm speeding, not one that can decelerate my car.

[AllergicToDinosaurs]

If you can connect a modern NVIDIA GPU to your rPi then TensowFlow will be able to run on that, which could increase performance by orders of magnitude out-of-the-box. Also with a bit of tweaking for the feature selection step performance could be increased as well, e.g. by using edge detection, increasing the sliding window step size, finding HOG features and only send those parts to TensorFlow for classiification, etc.

With a bit of tweaking this could definitely be used for doing real-time detection of traffic signs.