Most of the countries around the world are increasingly adopting Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems to support Law enforcement agencies in their enforcement and investigative capabilities, expand their collection of relevant data, and expedite the tedious and time consuming process of comparing vehicle license plates with lists of stolen, wanted, and other vehicles of interest manually.
What is ALPD?
ALPR systems that automatically capture an image of vehicle’s license plate, transform these images into alphanumeric characters using a processor and application capable of performing sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR). Then the software compare the transformed license plate characters to databases of license plates of interest to law enforcement. Finally, if a result of the OCR transformation match an agency’s “hot list” it alert and notify the operators.
ALPR systems typically capture the following information: a contextual photo of the vehicle, an image of the license plate, the geographic coordinates of where the image was captured, and the date and time of the recording. The systems also typically identify the specific camera/unit that captured the image.
The ALPD camera does not identify any individual or access their personal information through its analysis of license plate numbers. The data captured by the ALPD unit itself is completely anonymous. There is no personally identifiable information contained in an ALPD records.
How accurate is the ALPD technology?
As ALPD technology is translating optical characters to digital data there is a small error rate in translation of alphanumeric characters that are similar in shape. However, the accuracy overall is above %80 .
What are the common use cases for ALPD
- Parking management
- Traffic light control
- Borders control
- Toll collection
- Access control
- Traffic control
- Threat detection [stolen, lost, and fake plates ]
- Traffic enforcement