Suggestions for capturing license plate info?

[Jeff Kinz]

On Sun, Mar 12, 2006 at 03:36:02PM -0500, hewitt_tech wrote:
> Unfortunately my car and my daughter and her husband's car have been 
> vandalized by low life's who are shooting out windows with some kind of
> pellet gun. They struck last night shortly after midnight shooting out 3 
> windows. My car had it's rear driver side window shot out and my 
> daughter's Toyota (fairly new) had the back window and driver's window 
> shot out. The previous weekend my son-in-law had his rear window shot
> out.

Infrared illumination using one of the sony style handycams that 
does well in low light/infrared ?  (or will the license plate just
not get any contrast from being illuminated in infrared?)

Floodlight on housecurrent pointed at the street, kept on all night.

A real video camers (better resolution) running all the time, into 
a firewire link into a PC which captures 1 frame every 1 or 2 seconds.

All pure speculation.

> I believe this vandalism is random because the night my son-in-law 
> reported his window blown out the Manchester police said that there were 
> reports of twenty other vehicles damaged in the surrounding area. Last 
> night there weren't that many cars parked on the street but they only 
> damaged our cars. I couldn't sleep last night so I setup a Linksys web 
> cam that I have but I found almost immediately that the camera is not 
> effective in low light situations. Worse, no streetside window in my 
> house would give any kind of picture that could possibly show a license
> plate. The images that I could get were pretty poor and when the camera
> triggered due to motion, the passing vehicles were mostly a blur. I did 
> find out that if you wanted to even see anything of a passing car you
> needed to set the motion detected video segment to 5 seconds (the range
> allowed with the LinkSys software is 2 thru 5 seconds).  I do have a 2.4 
> ghz wireless black and white pin hole type camera that can be operated 
> off a 9 volt battery. Since the people who are doing this damage are 
> always driving West to East on our street in order to get a better shot 
> at the cars, I was thinking about setting up the tiny wireless camera on 
> the front dash of my Honda pointing in the direction of travel in hopes 
> that I might pick up the rear plates of passing cars.
> 
> Another low tech approach I am considering is to wait up next Friday and 
> Saturday night and simply wait a few doors down from my house with a 
> very powerful light and a cheap disposable flash camera in hopes of 
> catching the car's license plate should they decide to return. Of course 
> if this is just random harassment, maybe I should just forget the whole 
> thing. The police don't seem to be very effective as this vandalism has 
> been going on in Manchester all over the city for some time.
> 
> A friend suggested picking up a night vision scope in hopes of capturing 
> the license number.
> 
> Does anyone have any other suggestions?
> 
> -Alex
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
> 

-- 
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
speech recognition software may have been used to create this e-mail

Rumsfeld tells Bush, "3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq today."
  "Oh my Lord". says Bush. He sits with his head in his hands
for a long minute and then looks up and asks: "How many is a brazillion?

	            ba-da bing! 

          (Thank you, I'll be here all week, try the veal.)