Hikvision LPR Camera Tested

Great report IPVM on a decent LPR camera, but I gotta vent!

I do not like mathematical claims that include the term "up to". According to Hikvision this camera has:

• Capture Rate Up to 99%

• Recognition Rate Up to 95%

This weekend my Subaru's on-board trip computer was displaying up to 99.9MPG. Why doesn't Subaru market the new Outback as getting up to 99.9MPG? Marketing ethics?

Any video at night?

Report like this, is the main reason of keeping me here for years.  Good work.

Why not an Axis or Vivotek test?
Enough of Dahua and Hikvision ... nothing works and you continue to emphasize the Chinese.

I know these are HD and the instructions stated a specific minimum pixel size that you tested to.

All marketing aside, I recall trying to limit LPR to a single one of traffic for each camera so these appear to be a wider FOV than I expected. 

How did it do with a FOV of a single lane?

How did it do at maximum distance assuming it’s varifocal and IR illuminated?

Great Comparison , but with out at least 4 others to compare to , only singles out HV

need multiple companys for a real comparison 

Like to see DW , Flir, KT&C, Axis, Arecont, many others compared to see in report what they added upto 

Also would like to see , speeds of 25,50.75 , day vs Night , and relationship of the day/nite shots 

Like to see many more different ideals 

Rain, Snow, Bright , Pitch Dark , Fog in some of the test to see how they stack up. 

What I don’t understand:

Why are the camera manufacturers trying to do LPR with standard CCTV cameras? LPR is already succesfully deployed in the market with dedicated cameras for over 15 years now, by companies like; Tattile, Vigilate, ARVOO, PIPS, JPL, Quercus, ARH and a couple of others.

Applications like Parking Access, Traffic Data Collection and Enforcement. However, the mentioned companies are not the usuals suspects in CCTV. Plates are read with consistant accuracy performance, day and night, because the plates are read with global shutter, synchronized IR flash and fixed IR filter. Standard output is a JPEG picture and LPR data string plus optional metadata. For overview an optional second color sensor is used in the same housing that sends out the H.264 stream.

Yes, these dedicated LPR cameras are a bit more expensive (but not that much) and they actually do the job properly.

Just offering CCTV based LPR cameras that will work but not rock-solid, at a lower price point into a relatively limited market size does not sound like a strategy that makes a lot of sense for the large camera manufacturers.

Anyone in the group that can share an opinion on this?

"Finally, the 4A26 has no plate data integration to third-party VMSes"

We have made Ksenos VMS integration for this camera, to open gates and other low speed solutions.

While LPR is still pretty high end application, we are seeing more and more demand for license plate capture( where the plates are recorded and manually searched off the video). Can you do a License Plate Capture shootout? Many manufacturers claim that their cameras can do license plate capture but to what extent is the real question. 

At the Hikvision Roadshow last week, they showed us a slightly tighter integration with IVMS-4200 their NVR. You could search by tag criteria, such as a partial plate, or the full tag if known. However, they couldn't figure out how to see a list (or export one) that showed a log of plates read. The underlying ANPR data was there, but it was only available via search.

Update: Based on feedback from users, we have added a brief section showing integration between the 9000 series NVR and LPR camera attached, which does allow LPR search, event images, and video retrieval from iVMS-4200. As confirmed by tech support, there is no direct integration to the camera, but tied to an NVR it works as expected.

I just ordered this camera last week. Hopefully, will be able to test it with Hikcentral next week.

For your information, LPR is als supported by the less expensive 7700 series and there is a plugin available for Milestone.

Good article, Ethan but can I just add a few points?

We've used the LP camera across a range of Hiks NVR's, but as the LPR's are usually on higher end jobs - we settle on the 96 series more often than not.

The IVMS allows multiple LPR cameras to be searched simultaneously on the same or different sites - a really useful feature.

Not sure if I missed it in the write up - but bear in mind it can also support up-to 4 lanes of traffic.

Coming onto settings we found that 1/1000 exposure is best and gain set to 20, use manual focus and set day/night switch to "Triggered by video" with a sensitivity of 7. Smart IR "Off" of course.

There are annoyances for me - I'd like the camera set-up preferences to be consistent across the camera menu, NVR menu and IVMS, but we just work on the camera menu to have the full access to what we need.

In regard to misreads, we have occasional ones but what the article doesn't show is our anecdotal experience that if it captures text on a back of a vehicle in error, invariably it captures the VRN immediately afterwards as shown on the image below. (Notice the consistency of style on UK plates - white is a front read and yellow being a rear read).

Which lenses was tested? Because for this scenario Hikvision recommend 8~32mm

NVR is not required for integration with iVMS-4200.

There are 2 modules in iVMS-4200, 'License Plate Retrieval' that works with NVR and 'Road Traffic' that can search plates stored in microSD in LPR camera and export image captures and data to an Excel file.

Both of them are pretty much the same, one for accessing NVR and other for IPC, I don't really know why Hikvision includes two modules so similar, probably they come from different R&D develops.

Ethan, using V2.7.0.10 it's lurking in the modules customisation link under the statistics heading. Having tried it - on my set-up it doesn't actually connect, whilst the LPR works fine - so I'd need to check that out. I can't see a .csv export either, but without data I don't know for sure:

I am assuming the LPR camera has to be installed low on the ground.  How do you protect the camera from vandals in a bad neighborhood?

Has anyone had troubles with this camera telling the difference between zeros and the letter O? On some plates the camera also says the letter O instead of the number zero. 

Any recommendations? 

There is a Milestone Plugin for this that has its own Tab in Milestone. Works Brilliant and as is on the edge, No hefty LPR server.

Contact me for more details about the Smart Protect Plugin. 3rd Party not from Milestone and attaches to the SLC.

Thanks

Dan

It's been a little while since I visited this discussion, but just to add that we've found the end users to be more than satisfied with the performance. We manage expectations as t what may affect the accuracy of a read and the expected success rate. What some may overlook is that even a partial read is more than useful. By capturing the contextual video, a partial OCR read can be "manually" enhanced with the visual capture, which increases the read rate significantly (obviously doesn't help in data export, but does help in operational situations).

Whats impressed us is the ease of set-up, having used other systems in the past which were far more sensitive to height, angle, object distance than the Hikvision - which invariably burned cash in return visits and irate customers. 

I still feel this is a greatly overlooked product given the massive price difference to mainstream solutions and brings ANPR affordability to the majority of users with minimal engineering difficulty.

To be honest - not in my experience John. The customers we've sold to, don't generally use t for automation but do use system as an extension of the security functionality rather than automation of devices. Typically this will be a distribution depot, large office car park, hospitals and universities who are using the system to check quickly if a certain VRN has entered (left) site, or to check suspicious activities. In the case of the hospitals with multiple car-parks its proved priceless in assisting patients to locate cars as the system will check all ANPR cameras simultaneously and indicate which car park the car is in. This is easy using a partial VRN entry.

But I do agree that where additional integration is required, this may be an issue. Let's also be mindful that in the UK the partial read issue is significantly less than the US as only one, very prescriptive, license plate design is used as opposed to the US where seemingly anything goes.

I think if you sat your customers down and showed them the costs associated with other systems including licenses, and the showed them the Hik solution with only marginally less accuracy but massively lower costs - the decision is easy. The fact it sits on a standard NVR and uses the common GUI just added to the value.

Horses for courses....

We installed 2 of them and found we needed to use IVMS-5200 to have good reporting of the licence plates. We still felt the accuracy is not perfect (80%) although acceptable for the small application. If it was a very busy entrance and exit I would say hivkision ANPR might struggle with the accuracy. 

We also tested dahua and found the results identical to hikvision. 

That's way below our experience of accuracy. There are of course so many parameters that it would be hard to compare. But we consistently had over 90% and more typically 95% on a single camera, 2 lane entry/exit from a car park reading UK VRN's and traffic speed was relatively slow. We closed down the FOV to a nice tight pinch point (32mm lens) and monitored the system for every vehicle read for several hours to get it right.

We also used the settings that I covered earlier in this article that is not the same as what the cameras come out of the box with but made a massive difference (thanks as ever to Dave at DVS for the spot on info).

I am awaiting delivery for one of these 4A26/P (8-32mm lens) cams. Thank you for the donation Sam!

Has anyone noticed significant improvements in performance with current recent firmware updates?

I want to try supplementary IR illuminators with this cam. Any Raytec models someone would recommend?

USA Vehicles ill be capturing will be 75-150 feet distance, at 15-30 MPH.

I am awaiting delivery for one of these 4A26/P (8-32mm lens) cams. Thank you for the donation Sam!

Has anyone noticed significant improvements in performance with current recent firmware updates?

I want to try supplementary IR illuminators with this cam. Any Raytec models someone would recommend?

USA Vehicles I'll be capturing will be 75-150 feet distance, at 10-30 MPH.

Nick, I checked the Hikvision website and it doesn't look like they updated firmware since we tested this, I emailed Hikvision to confirm if there is newer firmware and if there are performance improvements, I will report back when they respond.