Full ALPR Database System for Blue Iris!

wpiman · Sunday at 9:16 PM

Vettester said:
There were a couple of early versions of BI6 where Ken changed the JSON format, but he has changed it back so if you are up to date it should be working.

I am on 6.0.3.8

VideoDad · Sunday at 9:22 PM

wpiman said:
I was just looking at my and realized the database hasn't update in a month. I'll take a look at it... I think the format from Blue Iris might have changed? There messages are still going in but it is complaining about the key I think

Check the API key didn't accidentally get reset. Can you give us the exact error message from the ALPR DB logs?

wpiman · Sunday at 9:30 PM

VideoDad said:
Check the API key didn't accidentally get reset. Can you give us the exact error message from the ALPR DB logs?

wpiman · Sunday at 9:37 PM

Error processing request: SyntaxError: Unexpected token ',', ...""ai_dump":, "Image":"... is not valid JSON
Error processing request: SyntaxError: Unexpected token ',', ...""ai_dump":, "Image":"... is not valid JSON
Error processing request: SyntaxError: Unexpected token ',', ...""ai_dump":, "Image":"... is not valid JSON

wpiman · Monday at 9:32 AM

So I ran the database command listed above...

Still didn't work.

I ended up having to change my Blue Iris HTTP alert POST body from:

{"ai_dump":&JSON, "Image":"&ALERT_JPEG", "camera":"&CAM", "timestamp":"&ALERT_TIME"}

To:

{"plate_number":"&PLATE", "Image":"&ALERT_JPEG", "camera":"&CAM", "timestamp":"&ALERT_TIME"}

Not quite sure what is up. At some point I moved Codeproject to CUDA and maybe Mike's ALPR 11...

TheWaterbug · Monday at 12:58 PM

wpiman said:
So I ran the database command listed above...

Still didn't work.

I ended up having to change my Blue Iris HTTP alert POST body from:

{"ai_dump":&JSON, "Image":"&ALERT_JPEG", "camera":"&CAM", "timestamp":"&ALERT_TIME"}

To:

{"plate_number":"&PLATE", "Image":"&ALERT_JPEG", "camera":"&CAM", "timestamp":"&ALERT_TIME"}

I'm using:

{ "ai_dump":&JSON, "Image":"&ALERT_JPEG", "camera":"&CAM", "ALERT_PATH": "&ALERT_PATH", "ALERT_CLIP": "&ALERT_CLIP", "timestamp":"&ALERT_TIME" }

and it's been working fine through the 5.x to 6.x transition, once I checked all the other required boxes.

wpiman · Monday at 1:41 PM

TheWaterbug said:
I'm using:

{ "ai_dump":&JSON, "Image":"&ALERT_JPEG", "camera":"&CAM", "ALERT_PATH": "&ALERT_PATH", "ALERT_CLIP": "&ALERT_CLIP", "timestamp":"&ALERT_TIME" }

and it's been working fine through the 5.x to 6.x transition, once I checked all the other required boxes.

Yeah, I am not sure why the ai_dump stopped working for me. I cloned a camera and one is working with Codeproject and the second ALPR one is working with working with the Blue Iris AI. Both are showing up with that change.

PeteJ · Monday at 2:47 PM

wpiman said:
Yeah, I am not sure why the ai_dump stopped working for me. I cloned a camera and one is working with Codeproject and the second ALPR one is working with working with the Blue Iris AI. Both are showing up with that change.

You can try expanding the macro in BI and see what it does.

P

Post in thread 'Full ALPR Database System for Blue Iris!'

Oct 16, 2025

You can expand any or all of your macros and save it to a text file on BI. To do this, go to your camera's On Alert tab and create a new action. Select write-to-file as the method. This should show what BI is sending to the ALPR database.

iwanttosee · Monday at 2:49 PM

wpiman said:
Yeah, I am not sure why the ai_dump stopped working for me. I cloned a camera and one is working with Codeproject and the second ALPR one is working with working with the Blue Iris AI. Both are showing up with that change.

Run
sudo docker ps -a

To get the Container:ID of postgres:13

Then
sudo docker exec -it Container:ID bash

Then Try below commands.

T

Post in thread 'Full ALPR Database System for Blue Iris!'

Dec 30, 2025

Here is the fix I applied
I ran this in the console section of portainer. I was in container alpr_database-db-1

#to get into PostgresSQL

psql -U postgres

#Then I applied this fix. Just copy and paste it

-- Create a sequence for the id column
CREATE SEQUENCE IF NOT EXISTS plate_reads_id_seq;

-- Attach the sequence to plate_reads.id
ALTER TABLE plate_reads
ALTER COLUMN id SET DEFAULT nextval('plate_reads_id_seq');

-- Ensure proper ownership
ALTER SEQUENCE plate_reads_id_seq
OWNED BY plate_reads.id;

-- Sync the sequence with existing rows
SELECT setval(
'plate_reads_id_seq'...

wpiman · Monday at 4:39 PM

Those are the post gres commands I wrote. Everything appears to be working with my new command-- just not sure when things got derailed... I like the idea of saving the file. I'll add that and wait for a car.

iwanttosee · Tuesday at 11:26 AM

Brand new install of ALPR database. Can't add any plate to known plates. No issue flagging a plate. No error in logs. Where do I start?

algertc · Wednesday at 4:39 AM

@iwanttosee that’s a good find. Thanks for sharing. If you add a known plate from your detections first, you should then see the button to add one without having seen it before. This is the original empty state from before it was possible to add them manually.

I have time to work on it this week.

TheWaterbug · Wednesday at 8:18 PM

Once again, Windows 11 decided to apply an update and then restart, without asking for permission :banghead:

. I've now got that turned off, I hope, and for all you Win10 folks out there, it's a different registry setting than the one that worksd in Win10.

But on-topic, Windows got stuck at that stupid pseudo-splash screen, mid-boot, where it asks you to set up stuff like Backup, waiting for a user to intervene and click Skip.

Services are running at this stage, but not user-level apps like Docker Desktop*, so while I was capturing plates in BI, they were not being logged in ALPR Database.

Is there any way to get those historical .dat/.jpg records into ALPR Database, after the fact?

It's not critical for the ~18 hours that I missed yesterday, but someday it might be.

* and is there a reliable way to run the free Docker Desktop as a service, that runs even when Windows is in that incompletely-booted state?

TheWaterbug · 2026-03-20T15:55:03-0400

TheWaterbug said:
So I just clicked the one radio button to switch from the "local service" (e.g. CPAI) to the Built-In AI:

View attachment 240023
then turned off the Object Detection and LPR in the CPAI dashboard:
View attachment 240021
and I'm still getting plates, so I guess it really is that simple! After a few days I will uninstall CPAI completely.

Is the built-in service any more efficient re: CPU and RAM than using CPAI?

On a related note, what's are my options for offloading more AI load onto another device, either a PCIe GPU or ???

When the driveways are busy, my CPU nearly pegs, and stays that way through the high traffic period.

wpiman · 2026-03-20T17:03:31-0400

TheWaterbug said:
On a related note, what's are my options for offloading more AI load onto another device, either a PCIe GPU or ???

When the driveways are busy, my CPU nearly pegs, and stays that way through the high traffic period.

I am using codeproject AI on a linux docker that does one camera.

PeteJ · 2026-03-20T17:36:53-0400

I had CPAI running on an 11th gen i3 and used the iGPU, and with Mike's YOLO v11 DirectML code, it was very good. Inference times were around 80-100ms. On another system, I'm running on an 11th gen laptop with an Nvidia GPU in Proxmox and it's 25ms with 4 cameras. The laptop is basically idle and uses very little power.

TheWaterbug · 2026-03-20T19:05:53-0400

PeteJ said:
I had CPAI running on an 11th gen i3 and used the iGPU, and with Mike's YOLO v11 DirectML code, it was very good. Inference times were around 80-100ms. On another system, I'm running on an 11th gen laptop with an Nvidia GPU in Proxmox and it's 25ms with 4 cameras. The laptop is basically idle and uses very little power.

Which GPU? Or does it not matter because they're all fast enough?

iwanttosee · 2026-03-20T19:19:29-0400

algertc said:
@iwanttosee that’s a good find. Thanks for sharing. If you add a known plate from your detections first, you should then see the button to add one without having seen it before. This is the original empty state from before it was possible to add them manually.

I have time to work on it this week.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. I cannot add any plate to "known plates."

I added a video.

PeteJ · 2026-03-20T19:37:13-0400

TheWaterbug said:
Which GPU? Or does it not matter because they're all fast enough?

For this application, I dont think it matters. I have a RTX3000 (Turing architecture) with 6GB of vram.

TheWaterbug · 2026-03-20T20:03:03-0400

PeteJ said:
https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/acceleration-for-built-in-ai.85161/
For this application, I dont think it matters. I have a RTX3000 (Turing architecture) with 6GB of vram.

Thanks! I'm going to move this discussion to this new thread, as my question really has nothing to do with the ALPR database!

Full ALPR Database System for Blue Iris!

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