Real life and images on screen interpenetrate more and more these days. Virtual and augmented reality are becoming a part of our life and images recognition spreading to different fields: from banal things like bar-codes to innovation domains like recognition of emotions on a human face.

But could you recognize license plates?

Recently one of our customers decided to apply the idea of images recognition to a specific domain - license plates. After being recognized, the number is sent to a special service, which provides information about the car. The information is similar to the information contained in a vehicle certificate of origin: car make and model, manufacture year, car type, VIN, motor ID… This information can be used in different fields: from detecting law violators to facilitating maintenance service and fueling questions.

But before starting development of solutions for different domains, the customer decided to check out the idea and create a Proof Of Concept (POC). The idea was to demonstrate the POC to investors and gain their support before starting development. This was the request he addressed to Noveo.

A way from imense® ANPReader SDK to OpenCV

Having considered the requirements, our team got down to work. As a result we have developed in short terms an iOS application that allows to make a photo from a device embedded camera, scan the photo, find and highlight detected license plates, send them to a webservice and display received information.

First the customer planned to recognize license plates with the help of a popular solution imense® ANPReader SDK, which suited well for the task, although embarrassed a bit with the license price. But as our team has already had experience in images recognition, we proposed to use the solution, developed by our team on the base of OpenCV library. Its usage could be interesting, as it allowed to solve the tasks as efficiently, avoiding superfluous expenses.

The development didn’t go without difficulties: in our case they appeared during integration with a third-party service. But thanks to the experience and skills of our developers, the issue was resolved and the prototype was demonstrated to investors in time.

So good, when everything is good!

As a result the application was appreciated by everyone: our customer mentioned high quality and speed of development, investors were impressed by the potential of the concept, and our developer said that it was interesting to work on this project. It is so good, when a project brings joy to everyone! We believe, that it has a great future and will be glad to work on a real app that will surely follow after this high-potential prototype!