ANPR Camera Installation

ANPR installation is one of those jobs where the difference between a good installer and a poor one shows up in a single number: the read rate. A number plate recognition camera that has been surveyed, mounted and commissioned properly will read plates reliably day and night for years. The same camera bolted on at the wrong height or angle will miss vehicles, misread characters and cause disputes from day one. Security & Electrical Group Ltd installs edge-processed ANPR cameras across England — and we treat the survey, the positioning and the accuracy testing as seriously as the installation itself.

One important distinction before we go further. This page covers our installation service: we survey your site, supply and install the cameras and connectivity, commission the system, prove its accuracy and hand it over. If what you actually want is someone to run your car park for you — payments, permits, enforcement and everything that goes with it — that is a different service, covered on our ANPR car park management page. Plenty of clients want the cameras without the managed scheme: gated commercial sites, private estates, industrial entrances, farm gates and car parks run in-house or by another operator. That's who this page is for.

Because SEG is an established CCTV and electrical contractor — not just an ANPR reseller — we handle the whole job with our own DBS-checked engineers: mounting poles and brackets, power, cabling, network or 4G connectivity, and integration with barriers and access control. One contractor, one point of responsibility, and a free site survey before you commit to anything.

Reading a number plate is a much narrower task than general CCTV surveillance, and it is far less forgiving of poor positioning. These are the factors our survey works through — and the reason a survey happens before we quote, not after we install.

Mounting height and angle. The camera needs a clear, near-straight-on view of the plate. For a single-lane entrance that usually means a mounting height of 2–3 metres, with the vertical angle to the plate kept below roughly 30 degrees and the horizontal angle as shallow as possible. Higher mounting resists tampering but foreshortens the plate; the survey finds the balance for your entrance.

Distance and lane width. Every ANPR camera has an optimal capture distance for its lens, and a plate must occupy enough pixels in the image to be read — as a rule of thumb, the plate characters need to be tall enough in the image that the recognition engine can distinguish a B from an 8 in poor light. Wide entrances may need the capture point narrowed with kerbing or signage, or a second camera.

One capture zone per lane. A single camera reads one lane reliably. Two-way entrances need a camera per direction; multi-lane entries need a camera per lane, each with its own defined capture zone so vehicles can't slip through between fields of view.

Headlight glare and IR illumination. At night the camera relies on infrared light reflecting off the plate's retro-reflective surface. Position the camera badly and oncoming headlights flood the image instead. We position and configure cameras — shutter speed, IR intensity, angle relative to approaching traffic — so plates stay readable when a vehicle approaches on full beam.

Vehicle speed. A camera set up for a barrier where vehicles crawl past will miss plates on a free-flow entrance where traffic passes at 30 mph. Expected speed drives shutter settings and capture-zone length, so we establish it during the survey rather than guessing.

Dedicated vs dual-purpose cameras. Some sites want one camera to do both plate reading and general surveillance. It can work at low speeds over short distances, but the exposure settings that make a plate readable often darken the rest of the scene. Where both jobs matter we'll usually recommend a dedicated ANPR camera plus an overview camera — and we'll show you the difference at survey stage rather than let you discover it later.

Where your site has an existing network or fixed-line broadband, we simply connect the ANPR cameras to it — our engineers run the cabling, configure the network and make sure camera traffic is properly segregated and secured. For many gated sites and buildings this is the straightforward option, and there is nothing extra to pay monthly for connectivity.

Where there is no connection — a standalone car park, a field gateway, a compound entrance — we install an industrial 4G/5G router with a managed SIM and data plan as part of the job. Because edge-processed ANPR transmits only plate reads and snapshots, the data usage is modest and predictable: this is machine data, not office internet, and the plan is sized accordingly. The router, SIM, data, monitoring and support are bundled into one monthly managed service, and we carry out a signal survey before quoting so you know the connection will hold up before any hardware is ordered.

Either way, connectivity is designed in at survey stage — not bolted on when someone realises the entrance is 400 metres from the nearest network point.

ANPR accuracy degrades quietly. A film of road grime on the lens, a bracket nudged by a wind-loaded pole, a mounting knocked by a high-sided vehicle — each shaves a few percent off the read rate, and nobody notices until the missed reads start causing arguments. A maintained system stays at the read rate it was commissioned at; an unmaintained one drifts.

SEG offers planned maintenance for every ANPR system we install: scheduled lens cleaning, checks and realignment of camera positioning, firmware updates for the cameras and any routers, and a review of read performance against the commissioning baseline. On 4G/5G-connected sites we also monitor the connection itself, so a dropped SIM or failing antenna gets picked up and fixed — usually before you're aware anything happened.

Support is available under the same maintenance and support agreements that cover our CCTV, access control and alarm clients, so one contract and one phone number covers the cameras, the connectivity and everything in between.