ANPR camera integration

When do you need this

When you want to allow faster access entry to the site, after registration on the kiosk is complete, use ANPR as an alternative for the PIN entry.

When you want to create a fast lane for frequent carriers that have all information provided upfront. The driver can drive to the fast lane where an ANPR camera can detect the license plate and open the barrier. This will automatically skip the kiosk process. However, a kiosk is always required as a back-up

• Remark 1: a kiosk should still be provided in case the camera detection does not work (5% of the cases). Otherwise, the truck will block the fast lane (driving backward is always avoided with trucks).

• Remark 2: it should be very clear for drivers whether they are allowed to use the fast lane or not. Best to limit this to very specific transports only (e.g. Daily deliveries with known drivers).

• Remark 3: the mobile number is almost always required to be able to contact the driver. We experience that in 90% of the case the phone number available upfront is the wrong one or just a dummy phone number. Again: only use a fast lane in case you work with trusted and high-quality carriers (e.g. For daily deliveries with known drivers)

Main idea

• Add and remove license plates to the whitelist of an ANPR camera as part of automated flows (using triggers & actions). Possibility to add license plates of a visitor and their attached assets (pick up or drop off).

• When an ANPR camera detects a license plate on the whitelist, the camera can automatically open a barrier (using an I/O output). So the barrier should always be connected to both the ANPR camera and the ACS controller.

• Listen to access granted events (= trigger), to update visitor onsite/offsite status or automate flows.

• License plates can be provided by backend integrations using the API, or visitor import with Excel.

• License plates can be provided by the driver at the kiosk.

Won’t do

• Known use cases that we might support in the future:

  • Use ANPR to check whether the visitor that wants to leave has picked up the correct trailer. We believe this is possible by matching the license plate of the trailer with the pin code used.

    • E.g. Visitor with pin code 1234 needs to pick up trailer abc123.

    • The barrier will only open if pin code 1234 is used AND the ANPR camera sees trailer abc123

  • Use ANPR to automatically detect the license plate of a truck and or trailer during registration. This way manual input of license plate on the kiosk is omitted.

    • We currently do not support this because this is technically challenging and the use case is not so big

  • Use ANPR to activate the weighing process

• ANPR is not a replacement for a pin code or badge-reader at the barrier. The accuracy of ANPR is still only 95%, which means that 5 out of 100 trucks won’t be able to access or leave using ANPR. A manual fallback using PIN or BADGE should always be provided.

• License plate integration won’t work through ACS systems, since we have learned these systems impose extra limitations and reduce accuracy (e.g. due to limitations of Wiegand interfaces on most ACS controllers).

License plate format

License plates in Peripass always have the following format:

• all uppercase

• no spaces or dashes

• no special characters except for Ü, Ö, Ä (used in German license plates). Symbols like š should be inputted as “S”.

Remark: Russian license plates use the Cyrillic alphabet, however, they only use the Cyrillic characters that look like roman characters. So this should not be an issue.

Validation in the management portal

In the management portal, we show a clear validation error when a user typed special characters. For user-friendliness, we still always do a conversion to uppercase and strip spaces or dashes.

In the SSK, a special keyboard is provided that contains only the allowed characters (so no extra validation is needed there).

Validation on public API / Excel

When a license plate is provided through our public API or excel, we don’t provide any validation of the license plate. Before saving the field, the following conversions are done:

• conversion to uppercase

• spaces, dashes are stripped

In short, we assume that the license plate was inputted correctly in the external system. We strip all spaces and dashes since the external system may allow them, but in Peripass our convention is to not have them. This way, an external system could still use dashes for saving a license plate without Peripass having difficulties with it.

Automation

The following things must be configured:

• Add license plates of a visitor (or an asset attached to a visitor) to the whitelist of an ANPR camera: with an Action in Triggers & Actions

• Remove license plates of a visitor and its attached assets from the whitelist of an ANPR camera: with an Action in Triggers & Actions

• Start other automations when a visitor was granted access by an ANPR camera: with a trigger that listens to access entry events. It is possible to listen to ACS entry events & ANPR entry events within the same trigger.

Special case:

• When 2 visitors register with the same license plate, Peripass cannot know which visitor is the correct one. Therefore we decided that Peripass will always trigger an access entry event for the visitor that registered last with this license plate.

• Reasoning: We have learned that in most of the cases when this happens, this is caused by returning trucks that did not properly check-out on their first visit. Therefore the last registered is more relevant that the one that was not checked out.

Supported ANPR cameras

We only support the Nedap LUMO ANPR camera.