Image recognition in the yard: reading type plates and part numbers

There is no keyboard in the workshop, but everyone has a phone in their pocket. That makes the camera the obvious capture device for a dismantling yard: photograph the type plate, carry on working, do the evaluation later at the desk. It saves time — and it prevents the most expensive class of error in stock keeping: the mis-typed number.

What can be extracted from images

• VINs from the type plate, the stamping or the windscreen — see VIN: Reading, checking and using the vehicle identification number.
• Part numbers from the component: manufacturer number, supplier number, revision level.
• Type plates with engine codes, gearbox codes and equipment codes.
• Labels and stampings on control units, gearboxes and axle components.

What follows is an assignment: the extracted number goes into a cross-check that returns article type, vehicle application and cross references — see OE number: reading original part numbers correctly.

What matters when taking the picture

1. Get close enough. The decisive mistake is too wide a frame. The number should fill the picture, not appear in it.
2. Do not throw away resolution. A thumbnail shrunk for sending turns a type plate into a grey smudge. Always transfer the original.
3. Light from the side, not head on. On stamped or cast numbers, raking light creates the contrast a frontal flash erases.
4. Clean first. Ten seconds with a rag saves the follow-up question.
5. Two shots instead of one. On difficult surfaces the second shot from another angle is often the legible one.

The decisive rule: gaps stay gaps

For every image evaluation at tapinomahub one rule holds: what the image does not evidence is not output. If a character of a part number cannot be read with certainty, the position stays open and is marked as open. We do not output a completed number that is right in format and guessed in content.

The reason is commercial, not philosophical. An empty position costs one enquiry. A guessed position costs a wrongly sold article, shipping out and back, a credit note and a review — and at worst the trust of a workshop that does not come back.

What image recognition does not do

• Condition assessment. No image tells you whether a brake disc is still within tolerance or a control unit works.
• Hidden identifiers. What sits behind a bracket does not become visible by photographing it.
• Retrofits. A part fitted from another vehicle carries its own number, not the vehicle's.
• A substitute for the vehicle file. Image evaluation returns numbers; the link to the donor vehicle comes from the process — see Part identification: from removed component to sellable record.