November 29, 2007
ALPR in Pttsburgh
From City's roving cameras rapidly scan license plates - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Some interesting nuggets on the integration of license plate recognition with other systems:
Pittsburgh bought the license plate scanning technology with $25,000 from the Pennsylvania Auto Theft Prevention Authority, an organization established by the Legislature in 1994 and funded by auto insurance companies. In two years of its use, police have recovered 180 stolen cars.
. . .
The system is used by Pennsylvania State Police, and license plate scanners are mounted at toll booths along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to watch for stolen and wanted vehicles and those who avoid paying tolls, officials said. The Pittsburgh Parking Authority uses a similar scanner to look for vehicles whose owners have outstanding parking violations, officials said.
Harper has visited other U.S. cities that combine the license-plate technology with surveillance cameras mounted throughout neighborhoods and hopes Pittsburgh can do the same. The technology allows police to enter specific query information into the database.
"If we have a bank robbery or other crime Downtown and we have these cameras with this technology mounted on bridges that connect to Downtown, we can enter the suspect vehicle information and the cameras will alert us if they scan a license plate that leads to the same car or make and model of a car that we're looking for," Harper said.
Posted by rshah at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2007
Chicago Updates
A couple of overdue items for Chicago
CTA Bus Cameras - A Tribune story with much more detail, they use the DriveCam system that was previously discussed here (use the search feature)
Alderman wants to ban cameras sensing devices from SunTimes- basically trying to outlaw devices that will provide warnings of red light cameras or speed cameras - as the article notes, its not going to happen, for more information on the technology, see this article in the SunTimes on the technology developed by Cobra
Finally, the city is using ANPR for parking tickets. Lots of cities have done this, but now Chicago is testing it out, see the Tribune article:
The van drivers make only one trip on a street because the paired cameras simultaneously read license plates of vehicles parked along both curbs. A beeping noise is emitted when license recognition software identifies a vehicle plate that is boot-eligible.
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July 18, 2007
Surveillance State Function Creep - London Congestion Charge
From Spy Blog:
Spy Blog has a post on the growing uses of the surveillance data in London. This data concerns the cameras (about 1,500) and the ANPR data that comes from the congestion charge system:
Police are to be given live access to London's congestion charge cameras - allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone. Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time. They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.
"The Met requires bulk ANPR data from TfL's camera network in London specifically for terrorism intelligence purposes and to prevent and investigate such offences. "The infrastructure will allow the real-time flow of data between TfL and the Met." Mr McNulty said the home secretary had signed a certificate exempting the two organisations from some provisions of the 1998 Data Protection Act.
The Met will produce an annual report for the Information Commissioner, the government's data protection watchdog who oversees how material from CCTV cameras is used.
Spy Blog goes on the criticize this function creep.
What is being proposed is real time data on everyone simply being slurped into who knows what sort of Metropolitan Police and passed on to who knows which other agencies anti-terrorism databases, both in the UK and overseas.
What safeguards are there for the millions of innocent people's vehicle movements which will be stored and analysed ?
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July 08, 2007
ANPR for Glasgow Suspects
From New York Times:
A short article on CCTV, video surveillance, and smart cameras in London contained a few interesting points.
The next wave in CCTV, experts say, is to marry traditional surveillance with computer software to make cameras better at detecting suspicious behavior that can be the precursor to a crime.
The police are believed to have used a rudimentary form of such technology to make the first arrest in this plot — Mohammed Asha, a Palestinian of Jordanian descent, who was captured on a motorway after his license plate was recognized by roadside cameras.
I don't know if anyone has confirmed that it was ANPR that caught the suspect. Other news articles mention it may be cell phone traces that led the police to the suspect. The article also mentions future uses for smart cameras:
More advanced applications include cameras that can be programmed to search for specific objects — say, an unattended bag in a subway station — or for people with suspicious mannerisms. Cameras that recognize facial characteristics are also being developed, though their effectiveness has been hampered by the unpredictable lighting in outdoor spaces. “Some people are looking very hard at suicide bombers,” said Peter Fry, director of the CCTV User Group, a trade association. “You can possibly pick up mannerisms, facial tics and so on. If that works, it would be a tremendous help in cases like these.”
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June 11, 2007
License Plate Cloning
More than 40,000 sets of number plates were stolen in 2006, a rise of almost 25%, according to police estimates.
Acpo wants a central issuing body for the registration numbers, and all cars to have tamper-proof plates fitted.
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February 12, 2007
Video of Automatic Licence Plate Recognition System (ALPR)
FROM Mobile Mag:
A nice video of ALPR in action
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November 17, 2006
ALPR in Canada
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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November 08, 2006
Eyenet
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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November 04, 2006
ANPR in Idaho
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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July 25, 2006
Mass Market LPR - A Recipe for Regulation
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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January 18, 2006
ANPR in the States
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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January 03, 2006
LAPD Smart Camera Systems
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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November 21, 2005
Using ANPR and CCTV to Track a Car
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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October 10, 2005
Automatic License Plate Scanners
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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June 20, 2005
London ANPR camera test
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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May 20, 2005
Talon ANPR at LA Airport
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
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May 05, 2005
Riding Along with ANPR
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.
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March 25, 2005
Automatic Number Plate Recognition in the UK
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.
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