Raspberry Pi Forums

Hello, beginner, and wanted to get some help with my first project.

I wanted to build a surveillance camera to watch the front of my house and even catch license plate numbers, but I had some questions.

Will the See3CAM_CU135 – 4K Custom Lens over USB 3.0 work on a Pi?
https://www.e-consystems.com/4k-usb-cam ... #documents

re there any alternative high-end camera modules that would work? The 5MP Pi camera looked good, but I wanted to get something better if possible, and be able too zoom in and out.

Thanks

Even the newer 8 mp pi camera will probably not satisfy your requirements. You can get relatively inexpensive net cameras from Foscam and others that may have zoom capability but I haven't heard of anything that will zoom the pi-camera lens. It is basically fixed focus and fixed focal length. The pi-camera lens can be adjusted to optimize a particular distance and other focal length lenses are available on eBay and other sites. Power zoom is a feature I have not seen associated with any of these cameras but they could be out there. Take extreme care with network security settings with net connected cameras.

if you are planing on running number plate recognition then you will probably find that you won't be able to run too a high res camera or there is too many pixels to process on a live stream of images. Most computer vision works on lower res. Youtube "Raspberry pi ANPR" here is a hit that I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d34II6pAR1Q