PLATELYTICS

DOCS

Platelytics Documentation

Platelytics is a real-time license plate recognition (LPR) monitoring platform. It ingests plate events from your cameras or edge devices, detects anomalies, and provides a centralized dashboard for operational oversight.

Your cameras or ALPR software (such as OpenALPR, Rekor, or a custom model) push plate sightings to the Platelytics API. Each sighting includes the plate text and a context image. From there, the platform normalizes the data, tracks history, and runs automated anomaly detection — all visible in real-time on your dashboard.

Quick Start

Get your first plate into Platelytics in under two minutes.

Create your account

Copy your API token

On the dashboard, click the Copy API Token button in the header. Your token is copied to your clipboard — keep it secure, as it authenticates all API requests.

Send your first plate

POST a plate text and image to the API:

curl -X POST https://platelytics.app/api/plate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -F "plate=ABC-123" \
  -F "photo=@/path/to/image.jpg"

A successful response returns 201 with the plate text and image key. Open your dashboard to see the event appear in real-time.

Dashboard

The dashboard is a real-time single-page view powered by live database subscriptions. All data updates automatically — no refresh needed. The dashboard pauses subscriptions during inactivity to conserve bandwidth and resumes when you return.

Overview Metrics

Six cards showing 24-hour captures, new plates seen in the last 24 hours, latest capture time, all-time totals, and active anomalies. The hourly chart below visualizes capture volume over your selected time window.

Plate Lookup

Search any plate by typing part of the text. Results appear instantly with last-seen time and tags. Click a result to view the full sighting history.

Capture Timeline

An interactive scrubable timeline. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom (1h to 1 week), click clusters to expand, and preview capture images inline. Jump to any date with the picker.

Anomaly Feed

Automated alerts for unusual patterns. Warning and critical anomalies are shown prominently; info-level are collapsed. Acknowledge to dismiss or configure per-category.

Recent Detections

The 10 most recent sightings in a table (desktop) or card list (mobile). Click thumbnails for fullscreen, edit plate text inline, or manage tags per plate.

Watchlist

Flag plates of interest with a label, severity, and notes. When a watchlisted plate is seen again, it surfaces in the Anomaly Feed at the severity you chose.

Usage History

Monthly breakdown of plate events, file count, and storage consumed. Displays your current plan and usage against limits.

Plate text correction

If your camera misreads a plate, click the pencil icon next to any detection in the Recent Detections table to correct it. The event is re-assigned to the correct plate record and all aggregate counts (capture count, first/last seen) are recomputed automatically.

Search

The Plate Lookup panel on the dashboard provides instant search across your plate database. Searches use a full-text index on normalized plate text (non-alphanumeric characters stripped, uppercased).

Prefix matching—Typing AB12 matches AB123, AB1234, etc.

Time windows—Toggle between Last 6 months (default) and All time.

Results—Up to 6 results per query. Each shows plate text, last seen time, and tags. Click to view the full plate detail page.

On the plate detail page (/PLATE_TEXT), you can see every sighting, manage tags, add notes, and flag or ignore the plate.

Anomaly Detection

Platelytics runs automated anomaly detection on cron schedules and inline during ingestion. Anomalies are deduplicated within a 30-minute window per category. Each category can be individually toggled on or off from the gear icon in the Anomaly Feed.

Category	Severity	Trigger
Camera offline	critical	No data from a camera for more than 2 hours
Capture rate drop	warning	A camera goes silent for more than 30 minutes
Traffic spike	warning	Hourly captures exceed mean + 2 standard deviations over the last 24h
Traffic drop	warning	Hourly captures fall below mean − 2 standard deviations over the last 24h
Off-hours activity	info	A capture occurs between 1:00–4:59 AM in your local timezone
Frequent sighting	warning	Same plate appears 5 or more times within the last hour
New plate	info	A plate is seen for the first time (suppressed until you have 100+ plates)
Day-over-day change	info	Today's total captures differ from yesterday's by more than 30%
Week-over-week change	warning	7-day capture total differs from the prior 7-day window by more than 30%
Gradual decline	warning	Daily totals have decreased for 5 or more consecutive days

Camera health tracking

When plate events include a cameraId in the capture context, Platelytics tracks camera health automatically. Status transitions: online → degraded (silent for 30 min) → offline (silent for 2 hours). Camera health is polled every 15 minutes.

API Reference

Authentication

All API requests require a bearer token in the Authorization header. Your token is automatically generated when you create your account. Copy it from the dashboard header — one token per account.

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN

GET/api/plate

Health check

Returns a simple status response. Useful for verifying connectivity.

Response

{ "status": "ready" }

POST/api/plate

Submit a plate sighting. Each request represents a single detection. The plate text is normalized (non-alphanumeric characters stripped, uppercased) for storage and search.

Headers

Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN>
Content-Type: multipart/form-data

Body (FormData)

Field	Type	Description
`plate`	string	License plate text as read by the camera (e.g. `ABC-123`)
`photo`	File	Context image (JPEG or PNG, max 1 MB)

Example Request

curl -X POST https://platelytics.app/api/plate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -F "plate=ABC-123" \
  -F "photo=@/path/to/image.jpg"

Success Response 201

{
  "status": "ok",
  "plate": "ABC-123",
  "imageKey": "usr_abc123/1708099200000-a1b2c3d4.jpg"
}

Error Responses

Status	Reason
`400`	Wrong content type, missing `plate` field, missing or invalid `photo`, or file exceeds 1 MB
`401`	Missing or invalid API token
`500`	Server error or plan limit reached

Idempotency: Each submission is stamped with a unique source ID. Duplicate submissions return the existing event identifiers with "duplicated": true instead of creating a duplicate record.

Plans & Limits

Plan	Plates / month	Price
Free	1,000	$0
Starter	5,000	Coming soon
Pro	25,000	Coming soon
Enterprise	100,000+	Coming soon

Requests that exceed your monthly plate limit will receive a 500 response. Upgrade to a higher tier to increase your limit.