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. An important question came up: 

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

In Europe, you find an LPR camera at almost all entrances and exits of any parking garage, the same thing in many other countries like China and Australia, but America seems to be 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? 

It is true that 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 thoughts,  we came up with a possible answer:

Rear plates.

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 requires the camera to be really close,  otherwise, modifications to the lane will be required.

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

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

But the most important 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 extreme 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 the LPR history.

That’s HUGE. 

We were ready then to solve what seemed to be the most important limitation that 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 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

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 LPR 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 kind of speed allows the Micropak to work closer than any other camera in the world.  

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 provider.