I thought I would put up a brief update on the license plate reading project. The first thing we have to do is gather a bunch of images of the backs of cars in the right setting. I have made further progress on the application to do that. Our plan is to send out a camera and a netbook computer with some mounting hardware to my cousin in Oregon how is starting a new drive-through business. We will set up an ftp site in our office to gather images for a development and test data set. The business in Oregon is not yet open and we will probably not be ready to send anything out there for a couple of months anyway. Still, we have a good start and I am capturing images from a webcam. The next step will be to use an industrial machine vision camera rather than a webcam so it can handle life in the wild.
I am doing most of my programming on a Windows laptop, but also have my Xubuntu netbook which will be the delivery platform. I have a microcontroller for digital I/O hooked up and talking to the windows laptop. Tomorrow, I am going to get that going on the Xubuntu netbook if I have enough time.
