Parking Spotter
The city of Sacramento, Calif., has implemented the AutoFind license-plate recognition software in its parking-patrol vehicles, automating the time-consuming processes of ensuring that vehicles have not stayed in a spot longer than is legal, or finding cars whose owners have not paid parking tickets.
The plate recognition program uses cameras to photograph license plates, then uses character-imaging software to translate the images into machine-readable characters; the car’s location is then noted and photographed so that the machine can tell if the same plate is read again at the same location by the time the parking limit expires.
On the vehicle that clamps boots onto the wheels of cars that have left five or more parking tickets unpaid, the software uses a pre-entered database of vehicles in violation and then alerts the officers in the vehicle when it sees plates that match those in the database.
The increased revenue from parking fines that the program has provided has already paid for its initial cost; the city’s police department is currently working on a database of stolen vehicles that the software can also be programmed to recognize. The department also hopes to use the program to implement automated ticketing in the near future.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Government Technology (07/05) Vol. 18, No. 7, P. 52; Douglas, Merrill.
