Talk:Automatic number-plate recognition

Automatic number-plate recognition is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 5, 2005.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
April 3, 2005	Peer review	Reviewed
September 10, 2005	Featured article candidate	Promoted
February 18, 2009	Featured article review	Demoted
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on March 31, 2005. The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that an automatic number plate recognition* system uses optical character recognition to read the license plates on vehicles?*
Current status: Former featured article

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Excellent article

Bravo - well done. Congratulations. Informative and interesting. It should definitely win the competiton.-->Energy (talk) 07:44, 5 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for the positive comments – it's always nice to hear that a good job has been done. The writing competition is actually over though, with this coming 6th and with many positive comments – that just goes to show the excellence of the other articles! violet/riga (t) 08:24, 5 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Runs on standard PC hardware"

Who says? There are many systems out there - certainly some of them may run on PCs, maybe even most of them these days. But it's hardly a defining feature of the type; if a company offered a system that ran on Sun servers or IBM mainframes, it would still be a number plate recognition system. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.205.31.138 (talk • contribs) 10:15, 5 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In the UK, the vast majority of ANPR software does run on standard x86 architecture (however some well known vendors have written their solution in java so it's probably quite easy to port to other systems) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.112.83 (talk • contribs) 21:45, 9 June 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Systems which run on smart cameras are starting to appear. There will be probably be more in the future. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.55.127.135 (talk) 18:01, 15 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Circumvention

Would the "sprays" and other methods of circumvention fall under "Obstruction of Justice"? IANAL, but it seems like that would be a good way for a judge or prosecutor to go.

Of course, you'd have to prove it was done deliberately, and since you can't use the ANPR< I suppose finding the car would be difficult.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.102.135.213 (talk • contribs) 23:15, 5 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hair spray works just as well, as far as i can tell anyways. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.66.4.102 (talk • contribs) 03:02, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"In principle, it may be possible to foil infrared detection simply by heating the license plate to a sufficient temperature so that the infrared brightness of the license plate exceeds that of the reflected signal that would otherwise be detected in the camera."

The portion of the invisible light spectrum that is visible to most CCD cameras includes a small portion of the ultraviolet range and what is commonly referred to as "near-IR"; wavelengths long enough to be invisible to human eyes, but not the same as the infrared radiation emitted by objects in proportion to their temperature. "Video" cameras cannot generally sense actual infrared radiation, and the CCD sensors that can sense heat require extreme refrigeration and can then *only* see thermal radiation. If you wanted to blind a traffic camera with heat, you would have to heat the plate until it was visibly glowing, at which point it would melt and fall off your car, which is admittedly an effective - if impractical - way to avoid prosecution. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.20.28.239 (talk) 12:35, 24 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Controversy

This section is a bit weak - the quote from Gregg whoever is especially unconvincing. It's important to distinguish between systems like red-light cameras (you get recorded if you break the law), and the (far more frightening from a privacy point of view) average speed measurement systems (you get recorded and kept on file even when you've done NOTHING wrong) - where are the safeguards what happens to the data? Will they be able to track every law-abiding motorist at whim? This should be stressed more in this section, I feel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.134.254.115 (talk • contribs) 15:28, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The quote from Judge (Gregg whoever) Easterbrook needs a citation. He is a well-respected jurist from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. The dismissal of his argument (specific to stationary traffic enforcement ALPR's) is conclusory, unconvincing, and reads like an industry talking point.

The larger controversy is the more interesting one: data compilation of all motorist's driving habits over months, years. Networked ALPR's could approach omniscience, (Big) Brother. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.232.118.10 (talk • contribs) 15:39, 8 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abbreviations

I'd find it helpful if there were parenthesis with abbreviations beside the words that would be abbreviated through the text so that the reader doesn't have to figure out by himself what the acronym means. 132.204.227.146 16:08, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Police number plate cameras may breach RIPA

ladies and gentlemen I beg your attention on this subject: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/17/anpr_ripa_breach/ I am not one to be writing articles , but I feel that it is worthy of mentioning this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yian (talk • contribs) 13:29, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Crossreference to Stockholm_congestion_tax#Technology?

Even though that section isn't very long, I'm pretty sure there is a lot more relevant info available on the internet, that both articles could be extended with. TERdON 02:19, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

FAR

There's a lot of work needed here; a featured article review can be avoided by addressing some of the deficiencies. There are a lot of cite tags, uncited hard data, short stubby sections, a lot of external jumps throughout the text, WP:DASH problems, unformatted incomplete citations (see WP:CITE/ES), attention to non-breaking hard spaces is needed (see WP:UNITS), and attention to WP:MOS#Captions punctuation is needed. Hopefully some of this can be done so a review can be avoided. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:28, 27 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

FE-Mittelschrift typeface

Interesting article at SpiekerBlog (en): Complete forgery detailing Germany's new licence plate typeface: "The official typeface for our license plates is now called FE-Mittelschrift, with FE meaning it is Fälschungs-Erschwert, i.e. difficult to forge." Just a pointer, in case there's any usable information for this article, or somewhere else related. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 08:04, 14 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, a bit more at German car number plates#Typeface. -- Quiddity (talk) 08:20, 14 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

German Court decision

Sorry, I only have a German Wikipedia account (and I don't want to edit articles without a name), so here just in the discussion section: The German court decision is not presented in its whole. The court decided that photographing number plates over a longer time, and keeping the detected numbers beyond the immediate reason (that may be, "terrorist hunt", or speed restriction enforcement), or using the numbers for other purposes than intendet in the first place, is not conform with German Basic Law). Maybe this text block should be extended to depict this issue more precisely. (Quality Control, German Wikipedia) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.59.34.130 (talk) 13:39, 17 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Section on China

I have updated the section on China as some of the grammer was not correct and it was quite difficult to follow. I have also removed the Chinese script, as this would be more suitable on the Chinese version of the page; however, I can't transfer it over as I don't know what it says.

here it is, incase you know what it says and feel it could be transferred to the Chinese version of the article

只有少部分地方使用该方法，例如青藏公路上有多个这样的点。在南方很少听说有这样的方法来限速。高速公路上一般有流动的测速点和固定的测速点可以自动拍照。

--Connelly90[AlbaGuBràth] (talk) 14:08, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the China section has nothing to do with ANPR. If China uses ANPR technology, the section should be reflective of that. If they use men with tickets and checkpoints, it does not belong in this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.55.99.126 (talk) 21:29, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

misuse/misunderstanding of "infrared"?

Following up and expanding the earlier comment in this discussion, it seems to me the beginning of the article is misusing the term infrared ("Systems commonly use infrared lighting to allow the camera to take the picture at any time of the day").

The cameras used for this purpose are either using visible light, or, in some cases, can be extended to pick up the "near infrared" wavelengths.

These are NOT heat, but are the part of the spectrum that are, loosely speaking, very, very, dark red (to the human eye) so appear to be black.

Looking for actual heat imagery would be troublesome because:

1: the cameras are VERY expensive 2: and have to be kept _cold_ 3: and probably wouldn't give you good imaging differential for the numbers on a license plate.

The advantage of using the "near IR" wavelengths is two fold: a: they tend to cut through haze a bit better than visible light. b: the cameras are pretty much standard, off the shelf units, and they can use electronic flashes that can be pretty "bright" to the sensors, but are just about invisible to any humans.

Note that the image sensors on most cameras are, indeed, sensitive to the "near IR" wavelengths. This, in fact, is part of how Sony's "nightshot" capability works - they move the IR filter _out_ of the path and activate a "near IR" (and almost invisible) LED source lamp.

(for a good writeup, check: http://www.batmanagement.com/Ordering/irlight/irlight.html)

Anyway, I'd suggest a bit of a rewording of that paragraph.

wiki-ny-2007 (talk) 19:08, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Citation 22

That citation references a Canadian case, and shouldn't be in the section about US ALPR uses. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adam850 (talk • contribs) 19:05, 20 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Canada

There's a wealth of information available at http://www.focusonline.ca/?q=node/312 and http://robwipond.com/?p=831 regarding ALPR use in Canada that may be worth integrating into this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.162.188.235 (talk) 21:40, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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