Licence Plate Recognition System

About the city. Sea Point is one of the most affluent and highly developed suburbs of Cape Town, in fact, the only where there is high-rise development of any significance.

Goal

The aim of the project is to improve the safety and security of the area by identifying and tracking every individual vehicle entering or leaving the area and coordinating law enforcement activity.

Implementation period. The project was implemented in 2015.

Fact

Not that long ago, the Sea Point area was considered less desirable, even dangerous. Many apartment buildings were run down by absentee landlords, leaving them in poor condition. The result was a high crime rate, most of which was related to vehicle-borne criminals.

Solutions

Some of Cape Town’s busiest roads leading to one of its wealthiest suburbs are now protected by an automated License Plate Recognition system installed by LPR Solutions. The project focused on recording every vehicle movement in and out of the Sea Point area using a minimum number of cameras. After analyzing the road infrastructure, LPR Solutions engineers identified 42 points for cameras, with each camera designed to monitor one lane of traffic. After these points were calculated, the requirements for cameras were investigated:

• Day/Night camera capable of withstanding the environmental conditions

• Camera and video monitoring software features

• Product availability

• Level of technical support

• Price

• Total Cost of Ownership

• Warranty

  Ultimately, the camera chosen was the Hikvision DS-2CD4012F-a Smart IPC day/night box camera, with each camera protected from environmental impact by an IP66 enclosure. The video stream of each camera is recorded to a dedicated server via Hikvision’s iVMS video monitoring software suite and fed from there to the LPR itrack license plate recognition software.

Challenges

The main problems in this project were changes in lighting conditions as they transition from day to night, the speed of passing transport and ensuring maximum reliability. Also, With an average of more than 300,000 vehicle movements per hour expected for a network of just over 40 cameras, the sheer volume of traffic represents a significant technical hurdle that the system’s developers have to overcome.

To solve this problem one of the new breed of SMART cameras from Hikivision was chosen. It provides unparalleled image quality in all lighting conditions and fast remote focusing, more than meeting needs for efficient use of bandwidth and storage utilisation. The LPR team also installed a wireless network and cabling links to feed camera streams to a special central control room located in Sea Point, which is serviced around-the-clock by a staff of six people.

Team

The Sea Point City Improvement District, a joint Municipal/Police entity, Installation by LPR Solutions, cameras from Hikvision

Timeline

• The increased surveillance has led to a drop in crime within the suburb, down an indicated 65% following the introduction of the cameras.
• Another immediate result of the success of the Sea Point installation was the award of a 75-camera contract with City of Cape Town Metro, which involved the transition from the original specified camera manufacturer to Hikvision smart cameras.

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