Micropak Short Range: A Camera Designed For The US Market

One day, we were brainstorming about how to empower our growth in the US Market. Then, an important question came up: 

Why are fewer LPR/ANPR cameras installed in the US than in other countries?

In Europe, you find LPR cameras at almost all entrances and exits of any parking garage, the same in many other countries like China and Australia, but America seems far behind.

Some questions came up:  

1. Why has the US Parking Industry been so slow to adopt this technology?
2. Why did the competition (and its related cost reduction) come so late to the US LPR sector? 

Indeed, American plates are not standard, every state has plenty of different designs, making it very costly to cover the whole country, but there must be something else.

After some thought, we came up with a possible answer:

Rear plates, of course!

In the USA, only rear plates are legally required, which means LPR must work reading rear plates before the car gets to the barrier (pre-capture mode), which needs the camera to be very close,  otherwise, modifications to the lane will be required.

In most US parking lots, there is not enough space to install an LPR/ANPR system that reads rear plates in pre-capture mode.

Could this simple peculiarity cause such underdevelopment in the LPR field?

But the most critical question was:

Can We do something about it?

We invited our Head of R&D, Jean-Luc Bonifas and after some thinking and testing, he came up with an extremely valuable breakthrough: 

With some tweaking on the hardware and our latest improvements with AI on the firmware, we could make our Micropak LPR camera read license plates at closer distances without compromising the data. 

How close? Well... 5 feet!

Yes! We managed to achieve the shortest reading distance ever in LPR history.

That’s HUGE. 

We were then ready to solve what seemed to be the most critical limitation US Parking faces when going LPR. So, we created our new  “Micropak Short Range,” a fine piece of high technology in almost no time, taking advantage of our early advances and continuous developments.

This LPR/ANPR camera could revolutionize the American LPR market, allowing almost any parking lot to install an LPR camera in pre-capture mode and benefit from many of the advantages of LPR-based Free Flow / Ticketless Parking solutions

For clients:

• No more lines at the exit: Free flow experience, less wear and tear of parking equipment
• Less pollution: Much less time inside the parking
• No more lost tickets!
• LPR-based Car Counting

For Operators:

• More efficiency: Higher occupancy, higher revenue, lower costs, automatic inventory
• More secure: No swapped tickets, no unauthorized vehicles, Accurate reporting, No lost tickets fraud.

2 (BIG) reasons why Survision can do this kind of technical “stunts”:

1. A Survision camera is a special kind of device: instead of depending on a physical trigger, it is always waiting at 60 fps to capture a plate, and as soon as the tag appears, it takes less than 20 ms to read/process the data. This speed allows the Micropak to work closer than any other camera.  

2. We develop everything, from the hardware to the firmware; we don’t depend on any third party for engineering developments; our R&D department is in constant contact with sales, which allows us to make any necessary updates much faster than any other LPR/ANPR provider.