Dataset Types
ANPR data
Description
Top image By Cameramann – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, link
Automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR; see also other names below) is a technology that uses optical character recognition on images to read vehicle registration plates to create vehicle location data. It can use existing closed-circuit television, road-rule enforcement cameras, or cameras specifically designed for the task. ANPR is used by police forces around the world for law enforcement purposes, including to check if a vehicle is registered or licensed. It is also used for electronic toll collection on pay-per-use roads and as a method of cataloguing the movements of traffic, for example by highways agencies.Automatic number-plate recognition can be used to store the images captured by the cameras as well as the text from the license plate, with some configurable to store a photograph of the driver. Systems commonly use infrared lighting to allow the camera to take the picture at any time of day or night.[1][2] ANPR technology must take into account plate variations from place to place.Concerns about these systems have centered on privacy issues, such as government tracking citizens’ movements, misidentification, high error rates, and increased government spending.
Typically, ANPR data is used in law enforcement processes; capturing suspects of crimes, monitoring average speed on stretches of roads, monitoring access to Low Emission Zones or parking areas,…
When best to use
In the field of mobility, there are a couple of other use cases that come into play:
- Monitoring number of vehicles passing by
- Counting vehicles to assess how busy traffic in certain location is
- Counting categories of passer-by to use this information in processes around different traffic modes
- Monitoring the speed of vehicles passing by
- Creating Origin/Destination matrices. This requires that the vehicles can be identified by a stable identifier for a certain amount of time. During that time window, the system knows the location of a vehicle and can calculate what teh origin and the destination is of the vehicle in the ANPR network. This enables
- Finetuning traffic models using the measured amount of vehicles vs. the counts predicted by the model
- Analyse commuting behaviour in a certain region
Main data elements
Issued: Monday, June 24, 2019
Modified: Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Language: English
Spatial: Global