I-CUBE Facial, License Plate Recognition and Image Analysis by Barry T. Dudley 031 764 3077 or 082 562 8225 or LPRAT I-Cube DOT co DOT za

The Seattle Police Department Web site has a note about an emerging technology that will allow police to scan up to 1,000 car license plates per hour, even in traffic. This new technology, which is spreading rapidly across the country, instantly checks license-plate information against a computer database of "hot sheets" -- lists that the police department keeps of stolen or suspicious cars. These scanners work while traffic is rolling. The cop on patrol doesn't have to enter any data himself/herself.

The Seattle PD site explained further:

The technology is license plate recognition and works much like a camera. It is installed on a patrol vehicle and automatically takes "digital" pictures of the license plates on the vehicles that the patrol car is passing. If the license plate that was read is listed as a stolen vehicle or is flagged for any other reason, the officer is notified that [he or she has] just passed a "vehicle of interest."

The computer has the ability to read up to 1,000 plates per hour, it covers two or more lanes of traffic at once, can read the plates during day and at night. It also takes less than one second from the time a vehicle is in the field of view to a determination it is a "vehicle of interest." When a vehicle is identified, [an] audible warning is sounded and the vehicle is imaged, time-stamped and registered.

There are many advantages to using this technology, the most obvious being the speed [at] which the computer can work. On average, thousands of plates can be scanned during a shift, [when] an individual officer might get only 100 plates during a shift (if [he or she is] focused exclusively on traffic). The technology is also performing a task that is already permitted, only doing it much more efficiently. Overall, the technology will realize some very important goals:

* It will increase the number of stolen cars recovered by the police department, before those cars are dumped or trashed and left by the car thief.
* It will increase the number of offenders who are ultimately arrested and prosecuted for the crime of auto theft.

I am seeing these systems pop up all over the country, in places like Schenectady, N.Y.; Long Beach, Calif.; Baltimore and in Canada, too. Officer.com, a police-news Web site, says:

Since four months ago, police departments in Las Vegas, Michigan and the California Highway Patrol have picked up the program, and the Los Angeles Police Department is currently testing a similar system.

In Utah, KSL-TV says, the "car zappers" have helped to recover more than 100 stolen cars already. KSL said:

Sgt. Curtis Stoddard, Utah Motor Vehicle Enforcement Division: "It's out there looking for that amber alert, that stolen vehicle now... and right there picks up."

For Stoddard, it's a very effective way to check, say, a parking lot for stolen vehicles.

[...] "As an officer, I'm gonna just focus on certain things...broken windows, punched locks but this doesn't care. It doesn't just look for those things. It's going to run everything," [he said].

[Stoddard said,] "Officers are going to use their time better. It's more accurate. They work well at night."

Some police argue that this system is actually more fair than manually scanning license plates, because the computer scans every tag, not just ones an officer considers to be suspect.

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