An application to document vehicle license plates that are recorded with on-site cameras, checking against databases of OK'd plate numbers and keeping track of unknown numbers, warning users in the case of repeat unknowns.
This project was done at Swift during a two day hackathon by Samia Jrab, Sean Perts, Victoria Parodi, Amber Davis, and I. We did not win but it was said to be a close competition between all participants, and either way we all learned a lot.
While this project is an interesting idea, and could easily improve the security of many companies, not just swift, It is a hackathon project, and thus is fairly quickly put together and should be redone before it sees any real-world use.
Some easily identifiable problems include:
- Susceptible to SQL injection
- 3 nodejs applications that must be running for full functionality
- An api continuously putting out updated views of the database
- Poorly implemented dashboard
- Oddly laid out database tables
On the plus side, much of this is fixed by really planning out how the program works, and writing the dashboard from scratch or starting with it.
The first and most important dependency is the open-source Automatic License Plate Reader program, which can be read about and installed here.
In order to run this monstrosity of a program, you first need to install all
npm dependencies, and run the database.sql against your postgresql database.
From here you have a choice, you can run filewatcher.js to add plates to the
database once you move an image into the imgin/ folder, or forego that step,
as it is not required to be running for the rest of the program to function.
The final step is to run both otherserver.js as well as server.js. but
otherserver.js must be run first. this is the part that exposes the api that
server.js reads from to populate the dashboard. If server.js is run first then
it will just crash, so it should be obvious when things are done wrong.
This program was tested only on debian linux, and even here it had problems, I would reccomend against using this program in any way in it's current state.