Beware Of The Watchful Eye

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: Police departments of various state governments, including Delhi, are going hi-tech in an endeavour to track down suspicious vehicles. The law enforcement authorities are considering the deployment of a new licence plate recognition technology, which could possibly be used for tracking down suspicious vehicles that are often used by insurgents to cause various acts of terrorism. Italian arms major Finmeccanica is believed to have given a demonstration of its technology to the Delhi Police and other state governments. Some test runs were done and are reported to have been conducted successfully.

Being heavily marketed to the police departments, the new technology called automatic licence plate recognition (ALPR), allows a camera mounted on top of a police cruiser to take infrared pictures of the licence plates of cars and store that information, complete with time, date and exact latitude and longitude coordinates. This sort of information is gathered anytime a car happens to travel past a police car. Additionally, side cameras are able to take pictures of cars parked on either side of the road. The technology was first developed in Britain in an attempt to monitor the operations of the Irish Republican Army, which had used car bombs in terrorist attacks.

The camera images are then sent to a computer, which converts the pictures into text and cross references against a list of stolen cars, known criminals, arrest warrants and those who have outstanding parking fines. If there is a hit, then an audible alarm in the police vehicle signals the officer.

Interestingly, the cameras can process thousands of licence plates in a day. In addition to an alarm in the police vehicle, the system also records time, date and coordinates where the plate was scanned. The system allows the police to check and see if a vehicle was at a ‘certain place at a certain time’.

In the US, authorities plan to install about 200 automated licence plate readers on police vehicles and alongside roads in the Washington area to thwart potential terrorist attacks. The rationale is to significantly expand the use of this high-tech tool, previously aimed at catching car thieves. The readers will scan the licence plate of every vehicle that zooms by and run the numbers through federal criminal databases and terrorist watch lists. When the machines get ‘hits’, they instantly notify police or other law enforcement officials, informs Paolo Girasole, country head (India), Finmeccanica.

According to Girasole, the auto-detector mobile licence plate reader has been developed to meet the operating requirements of the Italian police force, by drawing on the technological capabilities of Elsag Datamat, a leading company in optical character recognition, video surveillance, IT and system integration. In order to provide flexibility, a portable unit has also been developed. Contained in a compact case, it provides all the components needed for installation in any vehicle. The latest version of the system also provides a touchscreen and an improved software interface that offers better operator interaction.

Girasole informs that an increasing number of US police departments are acquiring the auto-detector solution. With its ability to provide 60 images per second, the ALPR camera is designed to provide high quality license plate images to the law enforcement officers. “Our ALPR technology is currently installed and operational in both fixed and mobile applications at over 5,000 law enforcement agencies around the world. Over 250 federal and state agencies across the US have deployed these systems to assist in a broad range of missions,” he adds.

Meanwhile, another US-based company called PlateScan is hard-selling a similar video imaging and licence plate capture technology. PlateScan’s proprietary software is supplied installed on the PlateScan trunk mounted computer, which, in turn, is connected to several vehicle mounted cameras optimised for licence plate recognition. Every licence plate is compared to a list of ‘vehicles of interest’ associated with auto theft or parking violations, or any other licence plate-oriented databases, the police agency wishes to use.