Jersey Vehicle Search

A web app that scans number plates using your phones camera and looks up car information from gov.je.

Installation

This is not a complete guide and assumes you're running on ubuntu.

IMPORTANT
You MUST connect to the site over https. This means you probably want to install the backend and site on a remote server

Install dependencies

# install libtool m4 automake cmake & pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libtool m4 automake cmake pkg-config chromium-browser make unzip

# install opencv
sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev

# install liblog4cplus-dev, liblog4cplus-1.1-9 and build-essential:
sudo apt-get install liblog4cplus-1.1-9 liblog4cplus-dev build-essential

Download & install leptonica 1.74.1

wget https://github.com/DanBloomberg/leptonica/archive/1.74.1.tar.gz

# unpack tarball and cd into leptonica directory
tar -xvzf 1.74.1.tar.gz
cd leptonica-1.74.1

# build leptonica
./autobuild
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

Download & install tesseract 3.0.5

$wget https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/archive/3.05.02.tar.gz

# unpack tarball and cd into tesseract directory
tar -xvzf
cd tesseract-3.05.02/

# build tesseract
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-debug LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo make install-langs
sudo ldconfig

Install libcurl3

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xapienz/curl34
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcurl4 libcurl4-openssl-dev  

Download & install openalpr

git clone https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr.git
cd openalpr/src 
mkdir build
cd build

# setup the compile environment
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr -DCMAKE_INSTALL_SYSCONFDIR:PATH=/etc ..

# and compile the library
make && sudo make install

Setup project

Once the above is done, complete the following:

1. Clone the repo
2. Run npm install in both the backend and site directories
3. In the backend directory, edit the config.json to set your desired port and set the chromium path
4. In the site directory, edit the src/App.ts file to change API_URL to your backend server
5. Enter both the site and backend directories and run npm start in each directory respectively

Notes

• It can be a bit tempermental. It uses the GB model from openalpr for reading number plates and it doesn't always work well with Jersey plates
• For some reason the uploaded images are blank. This didn't happen a few months ago when I last tested it, so for now I have hardcoded a number plate on the backend to allow demontrating the app

This is a test project and isn't intended to be released to the public. The site here is provided as a demonstration.

Backend API

If you just want to retrieve plate information as JSON, there is an API endpoint /:plate. Here is an example.

The site is hosted as a demo and may be taken down at any time. If you would like to implement this yourself, see the code.