ANPR lane capture camera for highway and toll lanes.

One lane, one camera

A lane capture camera is aimed at a single lane and sees the plate for a fraction of a second. That is a different job from watching a car park, and the body, the lens and the shutter setting are chosen for it.

Width of lane, mounting height and distance from the camera to the plate are the three inputs. Get them wrong and no amount of recognition software recovers the read.

Motion blur is a timing problem

At 30 to 60 km/h the plate is in the frame long enough to read only if the exposure is short and the camera is triggered at the right moment. A long exposure at dusk is the most common reason a lane camera produces unreadable plates.

Ask for the shutter range rather than the resolution. On a lane, resolution beyond what the plate needs is a disk cost, not an accuracy gain.

Where the read goes

A toll lane, a site entrance and a car park differ in what happens after the read. Toll and access control want the plate in real time, while a security record wants it stored with a snapshot and a timestamp.

State which one the site needs. The remote lane body adds 4G for a lane where no network run exists, and the recorder stays optional until the site grows into one.