Running licenses plates
 

Hi officers,

Just a quick question, the current primary method of running license plates on the road is done manually by typing onto the onboard computer right? What about in the borders and such, do the border officers run each car that passes by?

I am asking this because my fellow students and I have been working on a project dealing with automatic license plate recognition, where we write an algorithm to allow the program to automatically extract the characters from the license plate from a vehicle from a picture. I am sure you all heard of it and it is getting quite common everywhere as well.

We just want to know how helpful would such a system be in Canada and we would like to hear information from actual officers as well, which will be invaluable to us. Thanks.

check out this video

Look at the number of cameras taking pictures of your car as it pulls through the border lineup... pretty sure it's safe to say they're using ALPR there. You roll up to the window, they already have you car's full info on their screens.

I work with surveillance systems, I know it IS a hot topic for a big part of the industry, although we don't generally need to capture plates anymore. It used to be really big in fuel services (our main clients), to identify gas'n'dash cars, but since the pre-pay law came in, that hasn't been as big a concern.

The biggest issue with it right now is cost, since it's a fairly new technology, and works best with more expensive cameras (megapixel, etc.).

Now that I think about the border cameras, you are probably right. I know that alpr has already been introduced on some police cruisers as well in here and Toronto. But we just want to see how developed this field is, because we know ours still has a long way to go because it is unoptimized (each picture has to be about 1024x768 in dimension and about 2mb each).

Wow, 2MB?! You must be working with uncompressed BMP files or something... I'd think a low-compression JPEG would suffice. Have you looked at using grayscale or single-bit B&W images to cut the filesize down?

I've seen some processing tricks with increasing contrast, converting to grayscale, and alternate softening and sharpening (not necessarily in that order) to enhance plate detail, have you gotten to that point yet?

Standard analog video capture is limited to max of about 720x480, so you'd definitely have to use megapixel or HD cameras to get that image size (the ones we typically use are 1.3MP, 1280x1024). Are you using actual CCTV images for your work, or just shots from a still camera?

Wait until you start working on slow-shutter night images :D

Lol i know 2 mb is really a joke right now. We had been testing these with dslrs lol. Right now we are moving onto more efficent means of image capturing. Those definately works though, because we have to convert them to grayscale to B&W and then to binary images before we crop the license plate out anyways (though edge detection and pattern recognition). Thanks for the suggestions. We will look into the resolutions you posted. Are those the industry standard for traffic/vehicles monitoring?

Nope, those are just the laws of physics: NTSC video is 525 vertical lines of resolution; when all is said and done, 99% of the analog capture devices out there don't do more than 480 vertical pixels. I've seen maximum horizontal resolutions of 640, 704, 720 and 740, depending on the exact capture hardware used.

There are "megapixel" cameras that claim "720p" output (which is generally 1280x720, and not quite one megapixel); 1280x960 up to 1280x1024 are most common for the bottom end of the megapixel range. These cameras almost universally use IP interfaces, ie. they're network cameras, since analog video doesn't support those resolutions.

There's also a new emerging standard being developed, called HDcctv, that sends uncompressed 720p and 1080p video over a single coax line using SDI, but so far I haven't seen any of those devices on the market, just a lot of hype and smoke from the developers and proponents.

Sgt. Rick needs to wear his seatbelt!

Yes, this is the ALPR system currently in use here in BC.

only a small fraction of police cruisers are equipped with this.