Saint77
Burrrrrrrsitis!
Offline
Just saw this story on my local NBC news affilate. Its about a handheld scanner Police can use as they drive along to scan for unpaid tickets, unpaid tax debt, or other monies owed. It uses OCR to read the plates, and can scan around 1000 plates per minute. This was about all I could dig up on it in google.
Bootfinder, made by G2 Systems in Alexandria VA,
is a combination of a handheld digital camera,
OCR software for locating and reading license plates,
and a database lookup system that shows the user
whatever information it has about that license plate.
The software runs on a laptop; the article doesn't say
if it has an online live data feed or just runs on stored data.
The two governments currently using it, New Haven Conn
and Arlington County VA, are using it to find
car tax and parking ticket delinquents,
so it's something that doesn't need a live data feed,
but that would be easy to patch on - the hard technology's
in reading the number, not in using it.
It was originally developed for tracing stolen cars,
but the developer found that to be a hard sell with
cash-strapped police departments, while parking enforcement
is a revenue-generating activity so anything that
lets those departments rake in money faster is an easy sell.
One city saw their car tax payment compliance go from
80% to 95% because it was easy to catch many non-payers
and to scare other people into paying before they get caught.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200503/msg00205.html
Bootfinder, made by G2 Systems in Alexandria VA,
is a combination of a handheld digital camera,
OCR software for locating and reading license plates,
and a database lookup system that shows the user
whatever information it has about that license plate.
The software runs on a laptop; the article doesn't say
if it has an online live data feed or just runs on stored data.
The two governments currently using it, New Haven Conn
and Arlington County VA, are using it to find
car tax and parking ticket delinquents,
so it's something that doesn't need a live data feed,
but that would be easy to patch on - the hard technology's
in reading the number, not in using it.
It was originally developed for tracing stolen cars,
but the developer found that to be a hard sell with
cash-strapped police departments, while parking enforcement
is a revenue-generating activity so anything that
lets those departments rake in money faster is an easy sell.
One city saw their car tax payment compliance go from
80% to 95% because it was easy to catch many non-payers
and to scare other people into paying before they get caught.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200503/msg00205.html
