You’ll need USB 5 V power to the Pi and a mounting position suitable for reading plates, although the software is surprisingly tolerant of angles and heights, so don’t worry too much if you can’t get it perfectly aligned. This means the Raspberry Pi is probably going to live outside therefore, many environmental constraints come into place. Click here to subscribe to The MagPi magazine.įirst things first: where are we going to put it? Although this project has lots of applications, we’re going to see who’s home (or not) by reading number-plates of cars coming and going on a driveway. This tutorial was written by PJ Evans and first appeared in The MagPi 79. Let’s demonstrate what’s possible by building a system to detect and alert when a car comes onto the driveway. Now, even the Raspberry Pi has the ability to read number-plates with high accuracy using the Pi Camera Module and open-source software. It wasn’t long ago that ANPR technology was extremely expensive to purchase and implement.
Once the exclusive realm of the police, the technology used to accurately read car number-plates can now be found in supermarket and airport car parks.
Automatic number-plate recognition ( ANPR) is becoming more and more commonplace.
