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Help Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)

LOL FAIL !!!!

Sure it would would its whole 64k of ram

Yes, it could. Ignoring for a moment making use of its sideways RAM and other virtualisation techniques, you can easily rasterize a decent B&W image of a number plate in far less memory than 64K.

What people sometimes forget is that although the bitmap of a single rivet in a modern high-end game can have a file size larger than the BBC micro's entire memory, clever people can do an awful lot with a little. And in those days they had to. Like squeezing the game Elite and word processors into that small space. As for myself, perhaps not so clever, but I was responsible for a multiple-ROM searchable database of our local neighbourhood of stars. A bit like Google Sky without the polish.
 
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Yes, it could. Ignoring for a moment making use of its sideways RAM and other virtualisation techniques, you can easily rasterize a decent B&W image of a number plate in far less memory than 64K.

What people sometimes forget is that although the bitmap of a single rivet in a modern high-end game can have a file size larger than the BBC micro's entire memory, clever people can do an awful lot with a little. And in those days they had to. Like squeezing the game Elite and word processors into that small space. As for myself, perhaps not so clever, but I was responsible for a multiple-ROM searchable database of our local neighbourhood of stars. A bit like Google Sky without the polish.


Rubbish... And I was there at day one with home computers (im 39) still have a bbc model a/b and master I know them well
 
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Rubbish... And I was there at day one with home computers (im 39) still have a bbc model a/b and master I know them well

While you were watching Playschool and playing Killer Gorilla on the BBC Micro, I was developing code and hardware for use with the device. Perhaps you could share with the world your particular and unique knowledge that mysteriously forbids a simple bitmap from being analyzed.

And no weasel excuses like the BBC Micro doesn't have a camera or ethernet port... it didn't have a soundcard either but that didn't stop enthusiasts building their own.
 
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"a simple bitmap being analyzed" (sic) is an incredibly naive statement. If you knew what you were talking about you would say "a bitmap being simply analyzed" in the context of the old 8 bits. It's not the bitmap - its the computational requirements for the analysis that is the bottleneck for the beeb. What you'd need for this little problem is a serious machine - the speccy
 
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"a simple bitmap being analyzed" (sic) is an incredibly naive statement. If you knew what you were talking about you would say "a bitmap being simply analyzed" in the context of the old 8 bits. It's not the bitmap - its the computational requirements for the analysis that is the bottleneck for the beeb. What you'd need for this little problem is a serious machine - the speccy

That, my friend, is complete twaddle. Although featuring a humble 2MHz CPU, the BBC Micro was not loaded by the massive bloat that affects modern operating systems.

I incorporated the BBC Micro hardware into various laboratory instruments in the mid-80's that controlled high speed scanning hardware and performed data acquisition, spectral analysis and material composition. For the computational work, I developed a floating point library in machine code that worked brilliantly. So, yes, I do actually know what I am talking about.

As a software engineer of some 30 years standing, I'm highly confident that if I was paid to do a dumb task like simple pattern recognition on this hardware, I wouldn't refuse the work.

Would you have a crack, or just roll over and play dead?

The less said about the Speccy, the better, really!
 
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lol @ this typical internet flame'age...

As far as I can see there are two issues which would bring the bbc to its knees; 1) separating a nice "B&W image" of the plate from a constant video stream, and 2) handling a database with a few million entries.

I'm sure the bbc could OCR the plate details if fed a nice, straight image but that's not anpr as I see it.

ps speccies ruled anyway ;)
 
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As far as I can see there are two issues which would bring the bbc to its knees; 1) separating a nice "B&W image" of the plate from a constant video stream, and 2) handling a database with a few million entries.

I'm sure the bbc could OCR the plate details if fed a nice, straight image but that's not anpr as I see it.

ps speccies ruled anyway ;)

You are mixing up Automatic Number Plate Recognition per se with certain applications that make use of ANPR technology.

Police vans have a link to centralised DVLA servers where vehicle records are maintained.

Cameras in MacDonalds car parks do not.
 
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