Smart Cameras Blog

FROM Mobile Mag:

A nice video of ALPR in action

rshah ALPR

From United Press International:

Canadian police have began testing and using ALPR (also known as ANPR). They also provide some results:

Solicitor General John Les said, “We are taking back B.C. roads with this phenomenal technology,” labeling the ALPR system “the future of policing in B.C. It will look for anybody who shouldn’t be on the road. People who don’t have driver’s licenses; people who don’t have their car registered; people who don’t have insurance.”

In initial tests over the last several months the ALPR system allowed a single police car to scan 600 license plates per hour; the tests revealed that an average of 10 plates an hour were flagged by the in-car computer system as an alert.

Of the alerts, stolen vehicles accounted for 9 percent, 7 per cent were banned drivers, 25 per cent were unlicensed or uninsured vehicles and 59 per cent were associated with unlicensed drivers.

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From Daily Southtown:

Eyenet is an Illinois company that sells ALPR (automatic license plate recognition) technology. It can work with the existing camera and laptop in the squad car. This means its a lot easier and cheaper to deploy their technology. I don’t know the cost, but we are likely to see its widespread use. ALPR (also known as ANPR) works well and is a very useful tool for the police. Its a great example of smart camera technology.

Check out their web site, it appears to have some nice demos.

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Via thenewspaper, from Coeur d’Alene Press

ANPR will soon be deployed on I-90, which is a major road between Seattle and Chicago. A Homeland Security grant is paying for 8 cameras on the highway. Its not clear how the license plate data will be used. The local police figure it will help with stolen cars, Amber alerts, and terrorists. However, thenewspaper points out, this is a significant way to start tracking the movement of vehicles. Naturally, all of this depends on who is getting the data and how they utilize it.

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From Wired News:

Andy Bucholz of G2 Tactics has suggested that mobile license plate reading (LPR) or ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) will go mainstream. (More background on G2 Tactics). He is of course hoping that he can mass market his company’s technology. This lead him to make the following statements which appeared in Wired News:

a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.

Giant data-tracking firms such as ChoicePoint, Accurint and Acxiom already collect detailed personal and financial information on millions of Americans. Once they discover how lucrative it is to know where a person goes between the supermarket, for example, and the strip club, the LPR industry could explode, says Bucholz.

Private detectives would want the information. So would repo men or bail bondsmen. And the government, which often contracts out personal data collection — in part, so it doesn’t have to deal with Freedom of Information Act requests — might encourage it.

Not surprisingly, this hyperbole has resulted in a great deal of attention, such as a Slashdot article. I think this vision is unrealistic and really leads people to wonder why we don’t have regulation. I think any steps towards wholesale use of smart cameras by insurance companies and data-tracking firms will lead to strong support for regulation relating to privacy and surveillance.

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From Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:

A short article on the use of ANPR in Rancho Cucamonga. The ANPR is by Remington-Elsag and is mounted on the roof of an ordinary patrol car. It is capable of scanning hundreds of license plates while moving at 75 mph without any human intervention. The article doesn’t give the price but looks to be in the ball park of $12,000. The police are using it regularly and it has led to the recovery of a number of stolen cars. The system is also setup to flush its records every 24 hours.

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From EWeek:

The article is a short case study on how the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is rolling out smart camera technology. The notable advances include a car outfitted with smart cameras and ANPR as well as a mobile facial recognition system to aid officers in identifying gang members in the field.

Now the LAPD is testing a patrol car outfitted with $25,000 worth of technology—including in-car video recording, facial-recognition software and roof-mounted license-plate-recognition cameras. Patrolling the streets and highways of L.A., this smart car uses infrared technology to scan the license plates of cars it passes on both the left and right. A computer in the trunk immediately runs the collected information against a database that is updated daily with plate numbers associated with stolen vehicles, felony wanted suspects and Amber Alerts. If a passed car is a match, the officers in the car immediately see the information on their in-car notebook computer, Gomez said. Working continuously for 10 hours, the cameras can automatically scan between 5,000 and 8,000 cars per day, depending on the level of traffic, he said.

Another system includes a portable facial recognition system:

Levesque refers to the Mobile Identifier—which is built by ViewSonic Corp. of Walnut, Calif., with software developed by Neven Vision of Santa Monica, Calif.—as a “traveling mug book.” Levesque is the gang unit’s expert on the Mara Salvatrucha gang. Knowing all the gang’s members, he took the Mobile Identifier loaded with 1,000 mug shots into the field to see if it could identify gang members as well as he could. When a suspect is scanned with the Mobile Identifier, nine possible images appear in order of best match to worst match. Consistently, Levesque said, the device correctly identified the person in either the first or second position. Three hundred officers operate out of the Rampart district, and 12 officers work in the gang unit. Only two of those 12 are experts on a specific gang, Gomez said. Given the success of the test, “I can deploy anybody and make them a gang expert simply by handing them the pod,” he said. “I’ve essentially given Damien’s knowledge to officers who would otherwise not be able to make this arrest.”

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From the BBC:

A story on how Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) was used to track a suspected getaway car. In this case the ANPR was linked to a network of CCTV cameras that allowed the police to see the car. Its not clear is this was done in real time or with captured footage, but it is the natural progression of these types of smart camera systems. The story quotes a police chief that argues that these smart camera systems are the best investigative tool since DNA analysis. This means the cameras can and should be used (according to the chief) for:

“Denying criminals use of the roads denies access to the primary means of transport for a whole raft of criminal activity.

“It includes the transportation of drugs, stolen property and articles for use in crime, as well as transport for offenders to and from the scenes of crimes such as robberies and burglaries.

“The bottom line is that if a stolen vehicle comes into or out of Bradford city centre we will know about it.”

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From Schneier on Security

One of the oldest smart camera technologies is Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR). As the archives of this blog will point out, this technology is widely used in the UK, but rarely used in the US. I have no doubt that we are only one big media story away from widespread use of ANPR in the US. The article Schneier discusses is a car that drives around the city using ANPR to find cars with unpaid traffic tickets. Its not much of a leap to see this technology being used to identify users with other outstanding warrants. Moreover, there are unanswered questions about how the ANPR data will be handled.

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From Spyblogs London Congestion Charge advanced ANPR camera test:

The UK is moving ahead with using ANPR as a method of collecting toll fees. I don’t think its happened yet in the US, but as the technology improves its probably likely. Here is a snippet from the the Evening Standard article:

Trials for super-spy cameras By David Williams Motoring Edito, Evening Standard 17 June 2005. Secret trials of cameras for the extension to the congestion charge zone are under way. Powerful new digital cameras are being tested at two sites. They can read thousands of number plates in minutes.

They are more powerful than the CCTV cameras enforcing the ?5 charge – soon to rise to ?8 – in central London. Officials are testing accuracy as the cameras read thousands of number plates in quick succession; they are said to be highly impressed. The units use digital technology instead of the analogue system in the existing zone. They are more accurate and are not affected by the weather. Insiders say they can zoom in with far greater clarity than any previous-traffic camera, and they are believed to be able to read foreign plates.

Here is a picture of the system from Spyblog:

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