I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi and machine learning

Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by semi-extrinsic on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:50PM (#22400428)

The solution described in the blog uses 12 Nvidia T4s, which are basically specialized RTX 2080s. Depending on what vCPUs etc. get used, it's running 1000-1500 W of computing power continuously.

If their car was electric, this project would be increasing the power consumption of the vehicle by around 10%.

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Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by figo22 on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:55PM (#22400461)

I may have missed something, but I believe the T4s are running in the cloud, so it wouldn't have any effect on the car's power consumption.

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Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by semi-extrinsic on Sunday February 23, 2020 @07:00PM (#22400481)

To clarify, I mean indirectly the power consumption. I guess this will become an important point of discussion soon-ish, as we get more and more electric cars and ML stuff in them.

My view is, if your car uses electrons, and some of those are for compute, and you just offload the compute to the cloud, you haven't actually reduced the total electricity consumption.

Similarly here, the total "footprint" of the car is increased by adding this feature.

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Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by WrtCdEvrydy on Sunday February 23, 2020 @07:09PM (#22400519)

To be honest, there are open source ALPR (https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr) that could probably run lower framerates even on modern i7 processors (http://doc.openalpr.com/getting_started.html#hardware-requir..., https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FNwEuJAgZ1LyM2GGd7VR...)

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Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by rejschaap on Monday February 24, 2020 @02:08AM (#22402212)

Whether the car uses electrons or fossil fuels is pretty irrelevant, right?

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Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by speedgoose on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:25AM (#22402946)

I think the comparison with an electric car is to illustrate that this cloud solution is a waste of energy.

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Re:I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi an... by Piskvorrr on Monday February 24, 2020 @07:35AM (#22403507)

For a project that's intended to be a part of a car, cloud only makes sense for prototyping. 900 ms latency? Uh-oh.

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