North Carolina officials impressed by diversity of quality video for open road tolling

Jim Eden chief operating officer at the North Carolina Turnpike says after two weeks of vendor demonstrations of their license plate reading cameras that he's impressed by the diversity of different systems on offer. May 5 to 15 North Carolina Turnpike Authority hosted eight license plate reading vendors demonstrating their abilities in an open road setting.

NC Turnpike is committed to cashless all-electronic tolling when their billion dollar Triangle Expressway opens west of Raleigh at the end of 2010.

Andy Lelewski of PBS&J consultants to NCTA said that several of the vendors commented that they'd been looking for a site where they could try out their equipment. The demonstration brought in several vendors whose main business is reading number plates for police and security agencies, and who haven't offered their cameras previously for tolling.

Eden said: "It is very exciting to see the advances that have been made in just the past couple of years. It's also good to see new license plate reading players in the toll industry from other areas such as law enforcement (NDI technologies, PlateScan and Genetec.) Its also a benefit that international players, such as Kapsch, are now coming into our market."

The site for the demo was a lightly trafficked overpass to a park over I-40 not far from the major area airport. I-40 is four lanes each direction here. The cameras were demonstrated only taking images of the rear of vehicles.

There was no attempt to test the accuracy or 'capture rates' of the different systems, so it wasn't a competition. Different vendors shot their cameras under very different weather conditions.

Eden describes it as a "makeshift setup" with most of the gear mounted on a tripod aimed over the parapet of the overpass. If they wanted to maximize accuracy they'd need to mount their cameras on sturdier mounts, survey distances to the roadway and set up more robust triggering systems.

Even so each vendor was asked to provide the raw captured information as well as a performance metric as part of the demonstration.

The following draws heavily on an account by Eden:

In the morning session on Tuesday, May 6th, NDI Technologies with US offices in Longwood, Florida, demonstrated their product “VeriPlate” which dynamically captured and displayed license plate numbers read by the color and infrared camera combination system, performing optical character recognition (OCR) on vehicles traveling at highway speeds on I-40.

Cameras were temporarily mounted on tripods and on the rear window of an SUV producing images of license plates that were consistently captured and processed. The NDI system is currently deployed in Florida with various law enforcement agencies using the technology to read license plates from atop moving police cars.

NDI is based on Crewe England and has many systems deployed with British police forces.

The afternoon session on May 6th, PlateScan demonstrated a similar law enforcement technology that is deployed on the west coast. Both NDI and PlateScan utilized Cobra cameras and OCR provided by Appian Technology. Under the demonstration conditions, each vendor used vehicle motion to trigger the image capture. Once the license plate image was captured the plate number was OCR’ed with the results displayed on each vendor's front end display system.

PlateScan is based in Newport Beach California in the LA area, and they say on their website they've done extensive work for the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Kapsch TrafficCom with US offices in Wayne, NJ, performed their demonstration on Thursday, May 8th. Due to pending severe weather, the demonstration began at 11:00 am rather than 1:00 pm; however, the majority of the demonstration was completed in rainy conditions. Kapsch TrafficCom solution, which is deployed heavily overseas, ran two cameras mounted on a tripod overlooking I-40. The cameras were triggered with an overhead laser device (SICK AG), rather than by vehicle motion. Despite the rain and mist, images of plates were consistently captured and displayed on the front end portable computer display as vehicles traveled through the demonstration point at speeds over 60 mph.

Kapsch, based in Austria is a leading electronic toll systems supplier in Europe.

JAI Inc of San Jose, CA, preformed their demonstration using a camera system, a light sensor, ultraviolet strobe light and camera combination to capture license plate information. The system trigger initiates capture and the OCR resultant information is processed at the supporting computer system.

JAI is a European based camera systems company that bought up Pulnix a leading US camera maker in 2003. It is widely deployed.

IBM Global Business Services used the cameras of PIPS Technology, Knoxville TN, and Elsag, Genova, Italy to present part of their overall solution to capture and process license plate information via a post analysis. IBM plans to download the images from each of the cameras into a consolidated set of files, and go through its post processing activities as described, prior to their June presentation to NCTA.

PIPS Technology of Knoxville, TN presented their own separate solution for Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) by demonstrating three camera systems with internal illumination, IR, and color cameras and on-board OCR (optical character recognition) software with a frame rate of 50 per second. The use of the non-visible spectrum of light for plate illumination proved effective in the bright daylight as well as during the night demonstration.

PIPS is a subsidiary of Federal Signal.

GENETEC (AutoVu) of Saint-Laurent, Quebec presented their Fixed LRP system using an illumination source, IR camera and high resolution color camera. The system also contained an on-board OCR algorithm to process the license plates at the point of capture. The system has the ability to capture license plate information at 30 frames per second, utilizes Structured Query Language (SQL) and is based on an open architecture.

INEX/ZAMIR of Knoxville, TN presented their HY ALPR Camera/Illuminator system with pulsed IR LED illumination and a frame rate of 60 per second (max). They successfully demonstrated their system in mist and rain. The camera output is fed into a computer system utilizing their InSignia ALPR real-time plate recognition software. It is open system architecture and can be interfaced with various communication protocols for integration with back office applications.

INEX/Zamir is formed out of the merger of INEX Technologies in Knoxville TN and Zamir Recognition Systems a US owned company in Jerusalem, Israel. Their largest video sysytem is on the Illinois Tollway where they cover 350 lanes.

Computer Recognition Systems (CRS) pioneers of license plate readers in Britain signed up to demonstrate in North Carolina, but dropped out a week before saying they didn't feel comfortable they could do their equipment justice in the time available.

Major video systems weren't there including SAIC, Q-Free, Raytheon, Transport Data Systems, VESystems, Accenture, Perceptics, Alphatech and others.

North Carolina license plates use red which makes it difficult to do frontal photography. Infrared or near IR is usually used for front cameras to avoid having to flash visible light toward the motorist, but this works poorly in picking up red characters. The work-around is to arrange a visible light illuminator with a very narrow beam set to work at an angle that avoids the drivers' eyes.

NCTA got heavy local media coverage for the video toll demonstrations, all of it positive.

Eden and Lelweski said they and other staff learned a lot just by being around the vendors for several hours as each managed their equipment and engaged in conversation about it.

The pictures here were taken by JR Fenske, a staffer at NCTA.

NCTA will begin a toll systems procurement including video toll equipment in August.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-05-22