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Talon ANPR at LA Airport

May 20th, 2005

Appian Technology’s Talon ANPR will be used at the LA Airport according to SecurityPark.net. The contract involves:

The Talon ANPR system will be used to monitor and control vehicle movements in restricted areas at the extensive LAX complex. The system will comprise of multiple number plate readers (known as I STAR) scanning eight traffic lanes. A central processing computer will then cross reference recognised license plates against an authorised vehicle database. When unauthorised vehicles are detected the Talon system will generate an alarm which automatically alerts police and security staff.

According to Appian’s web site, Talon uses a neural network recognition engine instead of a template based Optical Character recognition system. This results in greater accuracy, other features:

High accuracy – typical performance in excess of 97%

High speed vehicle plate recognition – in excess of 195 kph

24 hour/365 day ‘all weather’ capability

International number plate reading capability

Automatic positive database matching and system alarms

Operates on any industry standard PC platform

Vehicle and Number Plate Image Output and Archiving

ALPR

Riding Along with ANPR

May 5th, 2005

From Welwyn & Hatfield Times Link:

A story following how ANPR technology is used:

A Hertfordshire police road intercept team was using an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) camera to stop law-breaking motorists on the A1000 by Hatfield House. And as the WHT chatted to sergeant Greg O’Toole in his team’s prototype ANPR vehicle, the state-of-the-art equipment suddenly alerted us to a motorist who was driving while disqualified. The incident illustrated perfectly the advantages of using the revolutionary cameras, according to Sgt O’Toole.”We would never normally have stopped that vehicle,” he said. “We get 20 to 30 incidents like that a day and around 100 a day in total.” Some of the information is low level but some is of great interest. We had a couple of chases last week.”

As the WHT reported on April 6 the innovative equipment works by checking the number plates of passing vehicles against police and DVLA databases and could soon be used on all police cars.The cross-checks also allow the team to see if there is a crime associated with a vehicle, according to Sgt O’Toole. “Fifty per cent of all arrests are for a priority crime offence like burglary, theft, robbery and drug offences.” In just three hours on the A1000 Sgt O’Toole’s team stopped 50 cars and four were towed away.

ALPR

Automatic Number Plate Recognition in the UK

March 25th, 2005

Spyblog has a article concerning Automatic Number Plate Recognition:

The technology is rapidly expanding technology amongst the 43 or so UK Police Forces.

John Lettice has a good article in The Register which cites a Police Information technology Organisation web page which lists the history of ANPR schemes.

Given the 25 to 30 million vehicles on the roads, it makes sense to use this sort of technology to try to clamp down on stolen or untaxed vehicles.

The use of mobile or fixed CCTV camera systems combined with a roadside police intercept team to conduct legal “stops and searches” of vehicles, where the grounds of “reasonable suspicion” have been provided by the ANPR lookup on the Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency and Police Intelligence databases, should be a proportionate use of the technology and is to be welcomed.

However, we really do have serious concerns about using ANPR for “intelligence” rather than for “reasonable suspicion” stops and searches.

ALPR