Number Plate Recognition Products

   CARMEN Parking - ANPR software package

Overview

CARMEN Parking is a special version of our Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology. It is specially designed and developed for parking and access control applications, where automatic identification of vehicles is needed.

Why it is needed?

Nowadays parking lots are becoming organic part of our everyday life. We use them day by day when going to work, shop, a hotel, a restaurant, an airport, a hospital etc. Parking our car, leaving it in safe, finding it there again - fast, comfortably and easily, that's the goal. To reduce costs, increase efficiency and security - that's an issue. Automatic Number Plate Recognition offers flexible, low maintenance, yet effective and intelligent technology for car park operation: ticketing, security, location services, etc.

CARMEN Parking provides the core ANPR technology with specialised features in a form so that it can be easily integrated into car park system.

Our market leading ANPR technology is capable of automatic detection, identification and recognition of the registration number of any vehicle.

With integration CARMEN ANPR into parking management systems, it becomes possible to automate vehicle entry to and exit from a car park or a secure zone and to use the recognised registration number for inventory management. The usage of CARMEN ANPR with our specially designed camera set - equipped and synchronised with a IR flash - provides quick and accurate identification of vehicles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without human assistance or any driver co-operation.
It is a significant added value for comprehensive parking management systems.

A parking lot equipped with CARMEN ANPR can provide
· flexible and automatic vehicle entry to and exit from a car park or secure area
· possibility to analyse car park usage (for management purposes),
· improved security for both car park operators and car park users,
· can improve traffic flow during peak periods, therefore preventing rush hour queuing

Furthermore,
· each recognised vehicle can have a date and time stamp and a location number associated with it
· exploiting the networking capabilities, a comprehensive database of traffic movement can be managed.

Since CARMEN is a software library (not a complete application), it can be tailored to meet the customer's special requirements, let it be either a single lane or a multi lane car park.

The system takes several images of a vehicle and after a statistical process it gives back the final result, thus achieving the highest accuracy rate.

To achieve the best results and avoid any incompatibility difficulties, CARMEN ANPR is delivered together with an own developed video capture card technology (i.e. FXVD4).

CARMEN IS A PROVEN PRODUCT. It works for the satisfaction of hundreds of customers around the World.

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Technical Specification

Supported Operating System	WinNT, Win2K
Programming Languages	Visual C/C++ 6.0 Visual Basic 6.0 Borland Delphi 5.0
Additional Tools	SDK for easy integration ActiveX, Delphi components JPEG Codec
Type of Plates	Recognition is country independent
Image Input	Video input from FXVD4
Video Formats	PAL or NTSC
Image Formats	Grayscale, RGB15, RGB16, RGB24
Processing Time Dependence	Image content (complexity) Image size Processing power (CPU speed) Parameter settings
Sample Processing Time	100ms @ CPU 500MHz, 768 x 288 pixels (PAL/2)
Output	Plate number in ASCII Plate position Positions of characters Tip list for each characters Confidence levels for each tips
Documentation	Reference Manual in printed form Reference Manual in electronic format
System Requirements (min)	Intel Celeron 466 MHz CPU 64 MB RAM Free PCI or PC104+ slot

 

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Components

CARMEN Parking CD-ROM

· CARMEN Parking Automatic Number Plate Recognition Engine

The core of CARMEN is an image processing software module (or software library) that interprets the content of raw visual data, extracts the important information and converts it into "computer understandable" format within a fraction of a second. The proprietary image recognition and OCR technology of Adaptive Recognition Hungary is embodied in this computer program. The CARMEN Engine provides the ability to read virtually any license plate in the world.
The CARMEN Engine has no user interface (GUI) but it has an Application Programming Interface (API) as the Engine has been designed to be integrated into application and to serve as an automatic number plate recognition service.

· Software Development Kit (SDK)

The SDK is a rich collection of tools, utilities and well-documented, self-explaining sample programs. It serves as a step-by-step guide on "how to integrate the ANPR Engine into your application". There are several C/C++, Visual C/C++, Visual Basic and Delphi programs in source code. For easy integration the SDK contains ActiveX interface for Visual Basic, and Components for Delphi.
It takes 15-30 minutes (!) for a programmer to create her/his first plate recognition application around the CARMEN ANPR Engine.

· CARMEN Reference Manual -in electronic form

CARMEN Reference Manual - in printed form

The Reference Manual describes the CARMEN's native Application Programming Interface in detail and also provides detailed information on the (higher) ActiveX and Delphi component level interfaces. It is the basic handbook of he plate recognition product.

FXVD4 Video Capture Card

The FXVD4 video capture card is an essential part of CARMEN Parking. To find more information on FXVD4, please go to the FXVD4 pages:

·FXVD4/PCI
·FXVD4/PC104+

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Applications

· Public/Private Car Park Management/Automation
· Vehicle Entrance Admission
· Vehicle Access Control
· Airport/Harbour Cargo Management/Control
· Vehicle Theft Prevention/Detection
· State Border Surveillance

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