Security Camera help please

Ring

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Will they capture a license plate number from 100’ away, in the dark, in real time?

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To capture license plates

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I think your sarcasm detector is broken...

If you have a home security system, I would check to see what options that have first. May even be able to add them to the monitoring system with no additional costs.

I recently picked up the Ring floodlight cameras (already had 2 doorbells) and am happy with the quality.

I know you said you don't need storage, but for a few hundred dollars you can get a system like Swann that would come with 4 cameras. Their phone app is pretty decent, and you would have the storage in case you decide down the road you want/need.

In daylight a lot of cameras can capture plate numbers. Might take a little tuning of exposure to eliminate blurring, but aside from that it boils down to just having enough pixels on the plate (close enough for the camera's resolution and FoV). Then if you want automatic plate recognition and OCR, that's just software that can run on the server if the camera isn't running it.

Night is a completely different story. The problem is that typically in low light conditions a camera will take much longer exposures per frame to capture enough light, but this results in motion blur. You might attempt a solution like you suggest, just capture a lot of short exposure frames and then stack them, but the vehicle you're interested in is almost always moving. So now the software needs to identify and crop the plate, then transform because the angle will be different in every frame, as will the relative size of the plate resulting in varying numbers of pixels per frame. This is a very hard problem (though solvable of course), but the easier and more reliable solution is to just use a camera designed to capture at least one high quality frame of a license plate at night. No hard computations across numerous frames, just identify the plate and run OCR.

Big sensor, bright infrared, very short exposure, and image processing that blacks out most of the frame so that the plate isn't bright as the sun washing out the frame.