How license plate recognition works at equipment yards
Direct answer: License plate recognition at a yard uses a dedicated camera mounted at plate height near the gate, with optics and processing tuned to read plates on vehicles entering and exiting. Each read becomes a searchable, timestamped event — building an audit trail of every vehicle movement, with alerts for unknown vehicles and lists for authorized ones.
Why the gate camera is its own camera
Plate capture is a geometry problem before it is a software problem. A wide-angle camera at 20 ft sees roofs and hoods at steep angles, motion-blurred and often washed out by headlights — great for detecting that a truck entered, useless for reading its plate reliably. LPR cameras mount low, aim shallow along the approach lane, and run exposure settings built for retroreflective plates at night. That is why SiteFortress360 sells LPR as a purpose-mounted add-on (+$199/mo), not a checkbox on the mast cameras.
What the yard gets out of it
Every entry and exit becomes a record: plate, timestamp, direction, linked clip. In practice that answers the questions yards actually ask:
- Which truck was on the yard between 2 and 4 AM Saturday?
- When did the rental skid steer leave, and behind which vehicle?
- Is this plate one of ours / a known carrier / a stranger?
- How many times has this unknown vehicle circled the gate this month?
Authorized lists and unknown-vehicle alerts
Where supported, authorized plate lists separate routine traffic (your crews, your carriers) from everything else. Routine plates pass silently into the log; unknown plates after hours raise alerts. Paired with gate control on compatible operators, the roadmap extends to plate-based entry — the gate opens for authorized plates on schedule, and every open is logged.
The quiet benefit is dispute resolution: carrier detention claims, “that delivery never arrived,” and sub-equipment walk-offs get settled by the log instead of by memory.