License plate number recognition with a third-party utility OpenALPR

Xeoma is a modern video surveillance program with innovative features and life-enhancing technology. Xeoma easily works with any camera type and any OS convenient for you. Automatic license plate recognition is one of such functions. Automatic license plate recognition is used to recognise cars license plates at check-points, at the enterprise entrance or parking.

You can use any program or library of yours to aid in recognition rate in Xeoma’s ANPR module by downloading and copying it into Xeoma directory, or through Xeoma ANPR’s installer^**. You are free to choose a program and either of the ways to use it in Xeoma.

For example a free additional utility OpenALPR can be used. OpenALPR is a separate program^* licensed under the AGPL (GPL). View license

You have full freedom of choice whether to use openALPR in Xeoma or not, and how. There are 2 main ways of using openALPR in Xeoma:

Automatically (through GUI)
1 Add the ANPR module to the chain.
2 Open the ANPR module’s settings.
3 Read the AGPL license.
4 Tick the country or countries you need license plate recognition for. If you tick Australia, USA, Europe and the UK, Singapore or South Korea, the openALPR utility will be downloaded to Xeoma folder, Additional subfolder automatically. openALPR will only be downloaded and then used “as is” (without auto-configuring of any kind) for license plates recognition automatically.

Manually
1 Add the ANPR module to the chain.
2 Download OpenALPR binary for Windows^***:

for Windows 64 bit
for Windows 32 bit

or download OpenALPR binary for Linux^***:

for Linux 64 bit
for Linux 32 bit

3 Create an openalpr folder in Additional subfolder of Xeoma directory.
4 Place the downloaded binary into the openalpr folder with the name
alpr.exe for Windows
alpr for Linux

5. If you have an openALPR license, you can activate it by changing the contents of \Xeoma\Additional\openalpr\etc\openalpr\license.conf with the code you got from openALPR. Important: turn Xeoma off before applying changes to that file (otherwise they won’t be saved). After you have saved the changes, you can turn Xeoma back on.

6. Go to the Automatic license plate recognition module’s settings and tick the country or countries you need license plate recognition for (Australia, USA, Europe and the UK, Singapore or South Korea). After that, Xeoma will start using the openALPR utility.

Download source code and compilation instruction:
source code and compilation instruction for openALPR are included into the binaries. Download the needed binary.

Other programs
You can use any other program to aid Xeoma’s ANPR as described for openANPR:

Xeoma saves image to a file and then calls OpenALPR with the following parameters:
alpr.exe -c ‹COUNTRY_CODE› --config ‹CONFIG_PATH› ‹IMAGE_PATH›
Then Xeoma reads the output from OpenALPR line by line. If an output line begins with a “plate” or contains “result”, Xeoma takes the following string that looks like:
" - ‹PLATE_NUMBER› confidence: 79.6227"
and extract ‹PLATE_NUMBER› from it. This will be the result of recognition.

A config file named openalpr.conf is next to OpenALPR in the folder.

^*Please note that openALPR is not a submodule of Xeoma. Both Xeoma and openALPR can work independent of each other.
^**Installer is just a form of “command prompt-response” combination.
^***Source code and compilation instruction for openALPR are already included to binary compressed file (see above)