The Vehicle Tracing system provides automatic search for wanted vehicles based on license plates. The licence plate is read by Automatic Number Plate Reading (ANPR) which means that no human interaction is required. Every vehicle tracing front-end system consists of one single location (gate) and is capable of operating in speeds up to 160 km/h. The solution provides front-shot images and even works in a Multi Lane Free Flow (MLFF) environment.

Whenever a blacklisted vehicle is detected, the system generates an alert and provides a high resolution digital image (front-shot). The general software and hardware design is based on a unique modular concept which allows easy scalability to cover highways from 1 lanes up to 6 lanes in one direction including hard-shoulder. Typically the front-end components are installed on a gantry on an open highway respectively on poles in city environment. But it also makes sense to install the road side sensors on existing infrastructure like tunnel ceilings or bridges.
 

Functionality:

The main purpose of EFKON’s vehicle tracing system is to check whether a passing vehicle is blacklisted or not. On every camera system is the current blacklist stored, which will be delivered by the back office over the communication backbone. 
  

The camera system automatically detects the license plate numbers and determines the time stamp of the event followed by an automatic search in the vehicle blacklist.

An alert is generated when a license plate is found within the blacklist and the alert data set is transmitted to the back office.

Each passing vehicle is detected by optical methods, which don’t make any pavement installations necessary. The cameras (one per lane) capture snapshots of vehicles and their front-shot characteristics.

The ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) software on the Lane Controller reads the digital image received from the corresponding camera. The result of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) will be than matched together with the detection time stamp to a complete traffic event.