Text recognition cameras not for license plates?

3 replies
The company I work for owns many commercial fuel sites (gas stations that only truck drivers and fleets can access by using a specialized credit card). We also sell these specialized credit cards but there are also a lot of other companies that sell the cards and other companies' cards also work at our sites. Since a majority of the vehicles that come to our sites have company contact information scrolled across them somewhere on the vehicle, we are sitting on a potential goldmine of leads for our specialized credit card division.

I would like to capitalize on this by setting up cameras that could capture this information. I know license plate capture and recognition cameras exist so I figure my idea is not that far of a stretch but I am not 100% sure this technology exists. I thought potentially someone here could offer some guidance?
#cameras #license #plates #recognition #text
  • Profile picture of the author AboutTown
    I'm sure you could achieve this with some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. You may be able to simply use Google Docs OCR capability but other OCR technologies exists Adobe Acrobat has good OCR tools. You could capture the images, store them somewhere, then run OCR on the images later on. If this needs to be done in real time it could get more complicated
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    • This definitely helps, thanks a ton! Follow up question, any idea on if there is an OCR software that is big box CRM compatible?
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      • Profile picture of the author AboutTown
        I'm not sure which CRM you are using but most CRM's support plug-ins and custom extensions. If your CRM has an extension or plug-in directory it may be worth searching it for OCR. Otherwise it may be possible to do your own custom integration with a cloud OCR service like the ABBYY Online/Cloud OCR SDK There are others besides this one too. The first step would be to test a sample image for one of the cards against the OCR tools to make sure it works properly. Some are better than others. Some experimentation with the OCR settings may be needed to get it right. Factors such as lighting in different weather conditions etc. may be problematic also. Would just take some experimentation, trial and error to get it right.
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