Automatic Number Plate Registration Plate Recognition

ANPR

Electro Automation has worked in the security and car park industries for four decades and with that comes certain core competencies, one of those being an excellent knowledge of number plate recognition systems.

Our ITS team works with the leading ANPR manufacturers to deliver quality solutions for our customers.

Electro Automation has been involved in the development of ANPR specific to Ireland and is unique in having the skills to ensure that these systems are as accurate as possible in reading Irish number plates. Plates can be read in many scenarios from barriered access control to free flow traffic enforcement. Plates can be read at speeds up to 150kph using systems, triggered or non-triggered.

The new generation of ANPR cameras can recognise the make and model of vehicles and match them to their licence plate using specialist algorithms.

The ANPR algorithm consists of two basic parts:

Detection of areas containing number plates
Recognition of the content of the number plates

The Make and Model Recognition system enables automatic description of the vehicle concerning its type (passenger car, van, truck, bus), make (e.g. Fiat, Volvo, Scania) and model (e.g. Ford Focus, Mercedes Atego, Volkswagen Transporter). The subject to the analysis is the image of the front of the vehicle, that is the outline of the bonnet, lights, grille, or bumper.

The image is converted in a complex, nonlinear process of parameterisation into a descriptor, which is compared with the reference database containing patterns of several thousand different vehicles. In the current database, there are 1,043 different vehicle models and the number of the vehicles collected exceeds 2,500 (taking into consideration the model versions).

A Watchlist can be created detailing cloned licence plates and stolen vehicles, with access given to the local police force.

A vehicle presence trigger input is also provided for the most demanding applications, for example, taking an overview picture of a vehicle with a missing plate. These ANPR cameras can be integrated into a wide variety of systems and connectivity can be over GPRS, EDGE or 3G. A GPS unit can also be fitted allowing very high accuracy times and delivery of information. Our ANPR cameras are fully web-enabled and can be configured and monitored from a standard web browser. External devices such as DSRC (dedicated short-range communication), radar, weigh-in-motion (WiM) or ticketing systems can be integrated into the system. A flexible interface allows these devices to trigger the camera and append information to the data set that the camera generates for each vehicle.

ANPR cameras will also be in use for Journey Time Analyses.