We offer CARMEN® the highest quality License Plate Recognition Software Engine with an SDK for system integration companies who construct systems for their partners.

Based on our over a decade long experience and know-how in real life license plate recognition applications, we have developed two versions of our CARMEN® License Plate Recognition Software Engine:
· CARMEN® Parking - the cost-effective solution, which is ideal for parking, vehicle entry and access control systems, and
· CARMEN® Freeflow - the general-purpose license plate recognition engine with unlimited possibilities, ideal for processing images of fast moving vehicles, processing high resolution or high dynamic range vehicle images.

CARMEN® Freeflow

The CARMEN® Freeflow License Plate Recognition Engine meets all the requirements a license plate recognition system may need to satisfy. It is capable of the automatic detection, identification and recognition of the registration number of any vehicle. CARMEN® helps system integrators and solution providers to meet the challenges of developing effective ITS, AVI, security or data management products and solutions by making it easier to incorporate vehicle license plate number based information into their computing environment.

CARMEN® Freeflow can be used in ALL applications, where automatic recognition of vehicle license plates is needed. It is fast (can even execute continuous license plate reading even at vehicle speeds of up to 250km/h), highly accurate (with close to 100% recognition accuracy) and provides extremely robust, fail-safe, stable performance under various conditions. There are thousands systems powered by the CARMEN® License Plate Recognition Engine under stable operation in more than 60 countries.

Due to its outstanding technology, its high accuracy rate, the speed of image processing and its adaptability, CARMEN® FreeFlow is stated by the customers to be the best of its class.

CARMEN® FreeFlow provides the core license plate recognition technology in a form so that it can be easily integrated into computer systems. It is very flexible: the CARMEN® SDK provides a comprehensive functions library to meet special customer requirements. CARMEN® FreeFlow is very easy to be integrated even into complex intelligent applications.

Technical Specifications of the CARMEN® FreeFlow Engine and its SDK

Supported Operating Systems Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 or Linux

Programming Languages Visual C/C++ 6.0
Visual Basic 6.0
Borland Delphi 5.0
GCC under Linux

Additional Tools SDK for easy integration
ActiveX, Delphi components

Type of Plates Recognition is country independent

Image Input Memory, file

File Types BMP, JPEG
File Formats Grayscale, RGB16, RGB24, RGB32, YUV

Recommended Image Size 640 x 480 pixels

Processing Time Dependence Image content (complexity)
Image size
Processing power (CPU speed)
Parameter settings

Sample Processing Time 50ms @ CPU 1GHz, 768 x 288 pixels (PAL/2)

Output Plate number in ASCII
Plate position
Positions of characters
Tip list for each characters
Confidence levels for each tips

Documentation Reference Manual in printed form
Reference Manual in electronic format

System Requirements Intel, PIII 1 GHz or higher Intel CPU
128 MB RAM
Free PCI / PC104+ slot or USB 2.0 port

CARMEN® Parking

The CARMEN® Parking License Plate Recognition Engine is a special version of the CARMEN® license plate recognition technology. It has been developed to offer an excellent solution for the growing need of parking and access control management systems.

With integration CARMEN® Parking into parking management systems, it becomes possible to automate vehicle entry to and exit from a car park or a secure zone and to use the recognised registration number for inventory management.

The usage of CARMEN® Parking with our specially designed camera set - equipped and synchronised with a IR flash - provides quick and accurate identification of vehicles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without human assistance or any driver co-operation.

One of the major applications of license plate recognition is parking and access control. These applications and systems have their own special requirements. In parking and access control applications recognition accuracy is a very critical issue both from the automation's and the security's point of view. However - on the other hand - vehicles have limited speed or frequently stop when their plates are being recognised. Therefore we have developed a special version of CARMEN®, the CARMEN® Parking, to meet all the special requirements of parking and access control. We have kept the flexibility of the SDK and of course the robustness and stability of the plate recognition engine while added extra features that are useful when making the application software of a parking, car park management or access control system.

Technical Specifications of the CARMEN® Parking Engine and its SDK

Supported Operating Systems Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 or Linux

Programming Languages Visual C/C++ 6.0
Visual Basic 6.0
Borland Delphi 5.0
GCC under Linux

Additional Tools SDK for easy integration
ActiveX, Delphi components

Type of Plates Recognition is country independent

Image Input Video input from FXVD4

Video Formats PAL or NTSC
Image Formats Grayscale, RGB16, RGB24, RGB32, YUV

Processing Time Dependence Image content (complexity)
Image size
Processing power (CPU speed)
Parameter settings

Sample Processing Time 100ms @ CPU 2 GHz, 768 x 288 pixels (PAL/2)

Output Plate number in ASCII
Plate position
Positions of characters
Tip list for each characters
Confidence levels for each tips

Documentation Reference Manual in printed form
Reference Manual in electronic format

System Requirements Intel, PIII 1 GHz or higher Intel CPU
128 MB RAM
Free PCI or PC104+ slot