What if they created the 57 line project, and spent $86 million to improve OpenALPR?
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How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
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Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#12The post starts with a false premise that: "[a medium post has been] doing the rounds the last few days, describing how an automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system being developed for the Australian Victoria Police could just use the open-source ALPR system OpenALPR instead" The original post was pretty much a tech demo, and noted a bunch of issues. I think the point was that an ALPR project shouldn't really…
In think the author of the original article really shot himself in the for by going with such a clickbaity title. I went into the post with low expectations, but I thought it was actually not bad, and as you say the point really was that the Australian government seems to be paying a lot of money for this system.
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#13The post starts with a false premise that: "[a medium post has been] doing the rounds the last few days, describing how an automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system being developed for the Australian Victoria Police could just use the open-source ALPR system OpenALPR instead" The original post was pretty much a tech demo, and noted a bunch of issues. I think the point was that an ALPR project shouldn't really…
That medium post is entitled "How I replicated an $86 million project in 57 lines of code". While it does contain some caveats, it's not like some copy editor misrepresented the authors intent when coming up with the headline.
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#14Two problems: 1. You've shown the success of OpenALPR isn't perfect, but I'm sure the closed source alternative isn't perfect either. It might be better, but is it $86 million better? 2. If we spent $86 million on developing OpenALPR, it would be an incredible product that everyone could use, without paying so much to the overhead of an executive structure.
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Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#15I'm pretty sure you could make it realtime with more than 10x improvement: Scan a thinner section of the video because the sky/ground is useless, and process every 10th frame.
This requires a vehicle to be right in front of the (police) car. Not very practical as most of the license plates you get to scan will be in other locations of the video - you know, since the car in front of you may be there the next 10 minutes whereas cars drive past you and are parked to the side all the time.
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#16I think this is a good case for why all government software should be open source.
How many police departments around the world are spending absurd amounts of money for this technology? It would make much more sense both cost and productivity wise to have one big project that anyone can improve on instead of multiple inferior projects.
Not to mention that all of this is paid for with taxpayer money, so it is reasonable for those same taxpayers to have access to the code.
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#17The first article points out the inefficiency and does a good job of replicating some basic functionality. It's basically saying "with this starting pointing, the performance is not as good, but we could probably make it a lot better without spending $86 mil" IMO, this one is saying "I'm gonna push the starting point even further back and complain about someone making a suggestion about inefficiencies." But that's th…
A little digging seems to indicate that the author makes a living as an engineer whose livelihood relies on customers paying for solutions provided by the company he works for, so naturally it is offensive that someone would criticize inflated costs associated with a third-party, closed source solution to a problem.
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#18Often time the devil is in the detail.
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#19I think this is a good case for why all government software should be open source. How many police departments around the world are spending absurd amounts of money for this technology? It would make much more sense both cost and productivity wise to have one big project that anyone can improve on instead of multiple inferior projects. Not to mention that all of this is paid for with taxpayer money, so it is reasonab…
Please join my campaign at http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto - this is exactly why we want all government software to be open source
(Shameless plug)
Re: How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
#20I wonder how much better it would work if either article specified the Australian training data that is included, instead I believe it is defaulting to the US set.
As for speed, there appears to be an OpenCL option that should be investigated.