The evolution of technology has enabled the innovation of many useful equipment to ease the human effort. Automatic Number Plate Recognition, being one such technology, is becoming prevalent worldwide.
It is an efficient technology that helps track traffic violations, manage parking situations and benefit multiple other user-dependent activities. ANPR systems are highly reliable and designed using cutting-edge technologies such as AI that make them extremely precise and functional.
So in this blog, we will cover some crucial aspects of the license plate recognition system to enhance your understanding of this system. Let us begin!
What is ANPR?
ANPR or Automatic Number Plate Recognition is a computer vision technology that automatically reads license number plates on vehicles without human interaction leveraging specialized software. ANPR uses real-time camera footage to capture and precisely identify any license plate number.
ANPR technology is hugely impacting the transport industry as vehicle number plate identification can serve various purposes such as:
- Transport Macro Modeling
- O-D Surveys (Origin-destination)
- Tolling
- Average Travel Time Surveys
- Speed Measurement
- Advanced Vehicle Classification
Automatic Number Plate Recognition is also often known by the given names:
- LPR (License Plate Recognition)
- Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI)
- Car Plate Recognition (CPR)
- Car Plate Reader (CPR)
- Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Cars
How Does the ANPR Work?
The working of ANPR is quite simple. The ANPR uses optical character recognition software to detect vehicle registration plates. The cameras in the device capture images of the number plates that are further processed by the software.
During image processing, the software identifies the characters and verifies their sequence to convert the number plate image to text. The system uses infrared light at night to detect the vehicle’s number and capture images.
ANPR systems usually comprise of:
- A digital image capture unit.
- A processing unit.
- Infrared lighting.
- Several algorithms for video analytics.
What are the Key Benefits of ANPR?
ANPR offers many real-world benefits that make it a highly popular technology of current times. Some of the noteworthy advantages are:
- Automation of manual tasks
- Effective space management
- Better governance
- Improved customer experience
- Faster execution of processes
Apart from the benefits, here are some use cases to know about the license plate recognition technology:
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Parking Management
No more wastage of time managing your parking tickets and risking penalties for inaccurate ticket payments as ANPR offers an integrated solution to identify individual vehicles and conduct efficient parking management.
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Traffic Violation
The law enforcement department has the biggest use case of ANPR systems. These are used for license plate recognition of vehicles breaking traffic laws.
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Tollbooth Payments
ANPR system has made the work of tollbooth payment effortless as the device automatically detects the number of your vehicle and automatically charges you the toll amount.
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Journey Time Analysis
A useful application of ANPR is journey time analysis which records and displays your journey time when moving from your source to the destination.
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Retail Park Security
ANPR technology can address and efficiently resolve the issue of unauthorized parking that often leads to unnecessary hassles and fights.
How Can AI Models be Trained to Accurately Train ANRP Models?
Data sets contain enormous information that the model learns to read and examine. Further, it makes decisions based on the provided data. For this system to design perfectly, it takes several engineers’ hard work and intelligence.
The good part about AI is once you program an AI model to learn and correctly apply its intelligence to the process, it can further train other models quite easily. Using a few lines of codes and leveraging pre-trained models, you can build trained ANRP Models that can be deployed at multiple locations.
Also, Learn About The Process of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Read Here!
How Shaip Helps Source Vehicle Number Plate Datasets?
The demand for automotive datasets to train ML models is surging tremendously. That is why Shaip’s experienced team of engineers and IT experts use advanced image/video annotation tools to streamline the entire process.
By leveraging advanced annotation tools, the teams make vehicle image labeling precise and functional for all use cases. The things captured in the images and videos are categorized into objects frame by frame.
Further, multiple techniques are used to detect the automatic license plate accurately. Some of the techniques include:
- Lidar
- Bounding Boxes
- Polygon Annotation
- Semantic Segmentation
- Object Tracking
In all, Shaip is one of the leading AI training service providers for training ANPR models to provide error-free functions at a cost-effective price.
Want to Know More? Read from Our Autonomous Vehicles Training Data Section
Summary
Automatic Number Plate Recognition is a great technology to eliminate human efforts and replace them with an advanced system that provides quick and effective results. Furthermore, the number of use cases for this technology is numerous, which justifies its surging demand. So if you, too, have a need for such technology or want to train your ANRP Models, get in touch with our AI experts from Shaip.
