Main Project is not active for few years. There is lot of issues and pushes but almost none solved. This fork aims to be more active and continue development.

** In case your alpr installation stops to work after OS update or upgrade just build from source again and it should work fine

openalpr

OpenALPR is an open source Automatic License Plate Recognition library written in C++ with bindings in C#, Java, Node.js, Go, and Python. The library analyzes images and video streams to identify license plates. The output is the text representation of any license plate characters.

User Guide

OpenALPR includes a command line utility. Simply typing "alpr [image file path]" is enough to get started recognizing license plate images.

user@linux:~/openalpr$ alpr ./samplecar.png

plate0: top 10 results -- Processing Time = 58.1879ms.
    - PE3R2X     confidence: 88.9371
    - PE32X      confidence: 78.1385
    - PE3R2      confidence: 77.5444
    - PE3R2Y     confidence: 76.1448
    - P63R2X     confidence: 72.9016
    - FE3R2X     confidence: 72.1147
    - PE32       confidence: 66.7458
    - PE32Y      confidence: 65.3462
    - P632X      confidence: 62.1031
    - P63R2      confidence: 61.5089

Detailed command line usage:

user@linux:~/openalpr$ alpr --help

USAGE: 

   alpr  [-c <country_code>] [--config <config_file>] [-n <topN>] [--seek
         <integer_ms>] [-p <pattern code>] [--clock] [-d] [-j] [--]
         [--version] [-h] <image_file_path>


Where: 

   -c <country_code>,  --country <country_code>
     Country code to identify (either us for USA or eu for Europe). 
     Default=us

   --config <config_file>
     Path to the openalpr.conf file

   -n <topN>,  --topn <topN>
     Max number of possible plate numbers to return.  Default=10

   --seek <integer_ms>
     Seek to the specified millisecond in a video file. Default=0

   -p <pattern code>,  --pattern <pattern code>
     Attempt to match the plate number against a plate pattern (e.g., md
     for Maryland, ca for California)

   --clock
     Measure/print the total time to process image and all plates. 
     Default=off

   -d,  --detect_region
     Attempt to detect the region of the plate image.  [Experimental] 
     Default=off

   -j,  --json
     Output recognition results in JSON format.  Default=off

   --,  --ignore_rest
     Ignores the rest of the labeled arguments following this flag.

   --version
     Displays version information and exits.

   -h,  --help
     Displays usage information and exits.

   <image_file_path>
     Image containing license plates


   OpenAlpr Command Line Utility

Binaries

Pre-compiled Windows binaries can be downloaded on the releases page

Install OpenALPR on Ubuntu 20.04 with the following commands:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y openalpr openalpr-daemon openalpr-utils libopenalpr-dev

From Source

#Install prerequisites
    sudo apt install libopencv-dev libtesseract-dev git cmake build-essential libleptonica-dev
    sudo apt install liblog4cplus-dev libcurl3-dev

#If using the daemon, install beanstalkd
    sudo apt install beanstalkd

#Clone the latest code from GitHub
    git clone https://github.com/mandza/openalpr.git

#Setup the build directory
    cd openalpr/src
    mkdir build
    cd build

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

#Compile the library
    make

#Install the binaries/libraries to your local system (prefix is /usr)
    sudo make install

Documentation

Detailed documentation is available at doc.openalpr.com

Integrating the Library

OpenALPR is written in C++ and has bindings in C#, Python, Node.js, Go, and Java. Please see this guide for examples showing how to run OpenALPR in your application: http://doc.openalpr.com/bindings.html

Compiling

OpenALPR compiles and runs on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

OpenALPR requires the following additional libraries:

- Tesseract OCR v3.0.4 (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract)
- OpenCV v2.4.8+ (http://opencv.org/)

After cloning this GitHub repository, you should download and extract Tesseract and OpenCV source code into their own directories. Compile both libraries.

Please follow these detailed compilation guides for your respective operating system:

• Windows
• Ubuntu Linux
• OS X
• Android Library
• Android Application Sample
• iOS
• iOS React Native
• Xamarin

If all went well, there should be an executable named alpr along with libopenalpr-static.a and libopenalpr.so that can be linked into your project.

Docker

# Build docker image
docker build -t openalpr https://github.com/mandza/openalpr.git
# Download test image
wget http://plates.openalpr.com/h786poj.jpg
# Run alpr on image
docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/data:ro openalpr -c eu h786poj.jpg

Questions

Please post questions or comments to the Google group list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openalpr

Contributions

Improvements to the OpenALPR library are always welcome. Please review the OpenALPR design description and get started.

Code contributions are not the only way to help out. Do you have a large library of license plate images? If so, please upload your data to the anonymous FTP located at upload.openalpr.com. Do you have time to "tag" plate images in an input image or help in other ways? Please let everyone know by posting a note in the forum.

License

Affero GPLv3 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html