A common goal for most businesses is to operate as efficiently as possible. Efficient operations save costs, improve quality, and boost employee morale.
ALPR technology captures images of vehicles with their unique license plate numbers and other details such as date, time, GPS coordinates, and color. This information is then uploaded to a server.
Improved Public Safety
License plate recognition systems mainly use law enforcement to detect and monitor criminal activity. Whether mounted on streetlight poles, highway bridges, and overpasses scanning the entire roadway or attached to police squad cars, these cameras capture every vehicle’s license plates and send them to a central server. From there, the automatic license plate recognition software takes over. This powerful system turns the image of a license plate into readable text and then records the license plate number along with the date, time, and location where it was captured.
With the help of specialized software, each image is processed and stored in a database, with all of this data available to law enforcement personnel. The software then compares each plate to a list of known vehicles, including stolen cars, linked to a crime scene or associated with gang members and individuals on law enforcement “hot lists.” The system can also store the images, dates, and GPS coordinates of vehicles seen in specific locations, which can be helpful for pattern recognition or tracking suspects.
In addition, some ANPR systems can capture and record images from the vehicle’s immediate environment. It includes the driver and passengers and the vehicle’s immediate surroundings, such as their homes or places of worship, which can help identify the vehicle in the case of an armed robbery or other crime committed against an individual. These cameras can even detect objects on the vehicle that could obstruct or block the plate from being read, such as tow bars or bike racks.
While these systems can enhance public safety, they can also raise privacy concerns. In some cases, ANPR systems create building blocks of massive government databases of the comings and goings of innocent New Yorkers, including their political and religious beliefs, daily habits, and whom they associate with.
Increased Productivity
The ability to automatically recognize license plates enables businesses to perform automated transactions, speeding up and improving the efficiency of processes. That is especially true for e-commerce and logistics, where high volumes of vehicles must be tracked and processed quickly.
For example, ANPR is used by highways and bridges to automate toll collection, minimizing traffic congestion and the need for manual transactions. Additionally, ANPR can track vehicles in a fleet for maintenance and driver safety analysis. Private individuals can also purchase and use ANPR technology for home and neighborhood security, voluntarily sharing the resulting data with law enforcement agencies.
While ANPR has proven to be an effective tool in the fight against crime, it can also be abused and used to violate civil liberties. A recent study found that even when police departments limit their ALPR usage to only identifying drivers on a hot list, the technology can still be used for invasive and discriminatory surveillance. To ensure that these tools effectively achieve their legitimate public safety goals, communities need transparency and mechanisms to invite their input into decisions regarding using ANPR.
ANPR technology has been hailed as a lifesaver in countless situations, from finding the suspect responsible for an arson at a rabbi’s home during Hanukkah to identifying the vehicle of an abducted Tennessee girl and locating her noncustodial father. However, these anecdotal successes have not been accompanied by a thorough evaluation of the tool’s value in the context of the more significant issues.
Most prevailing solutions for ANPR use deep-learning models, which require sizeable computational capacity and may not execute on resource-constrained edge devices. A hardware-efficient and low-resource-demand solution for ANPR has been developed and tested to address this challenge. It can recognize license plate numbers under diverse illuminations and weather conditions. It can also detect the distance between the camera and the license plate, eliminating the need for calibration of camera images to account for differences in lighting.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
ANPR systems are sound for law enforcement and can benefit public services and businesses. For example, ANPR can monitor areas of interest, such as illegal dumping and vandalism, and alert local authorities when an incident occurs. ANPR can also manage access in parking lots and garages by identifying vehicles and allowing authorized vehicles to enter and exit quickly. It helps to enhance customer satisfaction by providing a speedy and convenient service.
In addition, ANPR can be integrated with CCTV cameras to provide real-time location monitoring. It helps to protect employees from dangerous situations and ensures that incidents are appropriately investigated. Additionally, ANPR can monitor traffic flow and traffic conditions in cities, towns, and villages. It can help to reduce congestion and improve road safety for all users.
Another essential benefit of ANPR is that it can capture data at very high speeds. It is essential, especially on fast-moving highways and toll booths. Additionally, ANPR can be integrated with other technologies, such as gunshot detection systems, to enable even greater surveillance capabilities.
However, despite the many advantages of ANPR, privacy concerns can arise. For example, ANPR systems can capture images of a vehicle’s immediate surroundings, including bumper stickers that could reveal an individual’s political or social views. Furthermore, the information captured by ANPR can be matched with databases that contain sensitive personal information such as arrest records and warrants.
These issues could affect the accuracy and reliability of ANPR systems. Therefore, any ANPR system must be developed with rigorous testing and user input to ensure accuracy and trustworthiness. In addition, it is vital that laws are enacted to restrict access to this type of data and that privacy policies are posted. For example, some states prohibit using ALPRs for anything other than law enforcement and require warrants to search historical records. However, many states have no such restrictions and permit police departments to share license plate scans with private companies, such as toll collection agencies and pollution research firms.
Enhanced Employee Engagement
Whether it’s a vehicle tracking system that enables police to spot vehicles that belong to suspects they are investigating or a system that allows circle-k drivers to automate their payments without having to present credit cards at the service desk, automatic license plate recognition systems can offer significant operational efficiency gains. It translates to savings in time, money, and workforce resources that can be used for more critical tasks.
In addition to other functions, the technology can support access control systems limiting or granting access to parking lots and controlled areas on private or business premises. Combined with video surveillance cameras, these systems are powerful crime prevention tools.
Several communities are concerned that the use of ALPR systems could be abused. These concerns stem from the fact that ALPRs collect and store a staggering amount of data about individual citizens, including images, dates, times, and GPS coordinates. This data can be matched to databases that include “wanted person,” “protection order,” “missing person,” gang member, known or suspected terrorist, supervised release, and immigration violations.
Even more disturbing, many of the same technologies used to capture and analyze a vehicle’s license plate can track a driver’s movements over an extended period. Law enforcement agencies and private businesses, such as tollways or airport operators, can access this information.
The technology has been used in high-profile cases to find missing children, to track down a man accused of stabbing several people at a rabbi’s house during Hanukkah, and to help halt a spree of highway shootings in Kansas City. Despite these anecdotal successes, many questions remain about the technology’s value and effectiveness.
In light of these concerns, communities need to implement policies limiting the use and scope of ALPRs. These policies should require transparency and invite public input into whether or not the technology is appropriate for their jurisdictions. Additionally, they should specify how and when the system can be used and establish retention limits for capturing and storing data. In particular, historical searches of the system should only be allowed with a warrant supported by probable cause in non-emergency situations.