Number Plate Recognition Cameras
ABOUT ANPR TECHNOLOGY
A successful ANPR system starts with capturing high quality plate images. Usually this will involve a dedicated camera that clearly shows the number plate but little else. Separate overview cameras are often specified to obtain vehicle make and model.
The plate images will be fed to an ANPR “engine” which performs optical character recognition to convert the video into a text string. This is then written to a database. A well designed ANPR system can achieve around 97% accuracy.
- ‘White lists’ allow a system to produce alerts for unknown vehicles
- ‘Black lists’ allow a system to produce alerts for known vehicles
- Number plates can be tagged against CCTV footage allowing operators to quickly locate a vehicle of interest and follow it through any facility or transport network.
Police systems are usually linked into the Police national network which provides them with registered keeper details. Similarly private systems can be linked into the DVLA database
ANPR APPLICATIONS
- Security – Using black and white lists operators can get real-time alerts on unknown vehicles or previous offenders.
- Access Control – Using ANPR a vehicle can act just like an access control card to a low/medium security area.
- ANPR in Parking applications does away with barriers and tickets and instead using an account which helps the car park operator to build a marketing relationship with the user.