real time illegal parking system

[juliets]

i wanted to make a project that can to snap pictures of illegal parking and send it right away to the authorities.

does anyone can give any ideas on how should i start??

thank u

 

[biff44]

what is to stop someone from covering the camera lens?

 

[alexan_e]

what is to stop someone from covering the camera lens?

Well... he can always hire a guard to protect the camera that protects the parking....:-D
Just joking, sorry for the useless posting but I couldn't resist.

Alex

 

[Rob B]

Object tracking and recognition in MATLAB might be a start.

 

[BradtheRad]

A tall order. This sounds like a job for a webcam attached to a computer. The computer is on continually and has internet networking to the authorities.

I assume the authorities are anxious to be notified immediately about illegal parking?

Is the parking spot close to your window? If not then you'll need to shoot through one half of binoculars (monocular, spotting scope). It must be high enough magnification to give you sufficient resolution to identify the car (including the license plate).

You'll need to attach the webcam to the scope firmly. You can take pictures directly through a scope although you may need to do a lot of checking and adjusting to get a decent shot.

You'll need a trigger. A common method is a light detector circuit of some kind. The easiest way is to detect any movement and take a picture. However this would be prone to false alarms.

A better way is to take a picture every few minutes. Envelop the part of the picture containing the license plate. Send it to be opened in an optical character recognition program.

If the license plate is legal, do nothing. If it's illegal, then have the picture sent over the internet to the authorities.

To do all this will require that somebody be capable of writing a detailed computer script.

 

[KMoffett]

i wanted to make a project that can to snap pictures of illegal parking and send it right away to the authorities.

does anyone can give any ideas on how should i start??

thank u

First, what constitutes "illegal parking"?

Ken

 

[biff44]

I have heard talk of systems that report overdue parking meter positions. There is either a magnetic sensor buried in the road that can tell if a car is there when the parking meter runs out. You could do a crude radar sensor to tell if the space is open or not. You could wirelessly report back to a central office that a car is illegally parked.

But as far as seeing the license plate number, you usually can not get a good look at the license plate from the parking meter location due to the geometry.

So

 

[jpanhalt]

There is an even more clever/evil way to police overdue parking. In the cold North, parking meters supply current to engine block heaters. When your time runs out, so does the electricity.

It is easy to envision a system with one-way spikes that would remain retracted only as long as the meter still had time on it.

John