You don't need automated license plate recognition for that, though. If you find the motion events in the wee hours, and have a sufficiently high-quality video

You don't need automated license plate recognition for that, though. If you find the motion events in the wee hours, and have a sufficiently high-quality video frame [1], you can easily check the type of car and then know the license plate by reading it with the neural network that was preinstalled between your ears rather than a software one. I've been writing my own home surveillance camera network video recorder software, so I've thought about plugging in something like this, but I don't think it's really necessary. The one time I might use it is if there's a car that was likely involved in a burglary, I might scan the previous few weeks to find previous times they were in-frame. Then I might see their scoping the place out, potentially revealing more about themselves. It's too labor-intensive to look through that many motion events by hand. [1] My understanding is this requires some care. You have to select the right kind of camera, place/aim/zoom it carefully, and tune it for license plate recognition, particularly at night. I think the cameras typically come tuned for slow-moving, not-very-reflective-to-IR objects. License plates on a moving car are the opposite, so you want to say decrease the aperture and increase the shutter speed from the default, position it carefully as I said, maybe tweak some other settings, and test it.