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Jan 22, 2019 Smile! You’re on camera. At least, your license plate is. You might have heard of automatic license plate recognition — known as ALPR (or ANPR in the U.K. For number plates). These cameras are. License Plate Recognition technology, or LPR for short, has already made a big impact on the law enforcement field. A number of police forces already use this powerful technology to scan the license plates of cars passing by a given location, and the ability to scan thousands of license plates has already led to the apprehensions of murderers, rapists, child predators and other dangerous. Automatic license plate recognition systems (often referred to automatic number plate recognition systems outside of North America) is a mass surveillance technology designed to identify owners of vehicles by computer using optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically read your license plate.
I just read a very interesting article in Popular Science about repo trucks and their new auto-scanning license plate cameras.
How License Plate Readers Work
The cameras are mounted on all four corners of their trucks, as as they drive around they automatically scan any license plate number that comes into vision and compares it with an online database of 1.8 billion other scans. (Even though there a quarter of a billion cars in total in the U.S., vehicles are often scanned up to a dozen times or more.) A single truck can scan as many as 8,000 plates in one day.
If he gets a hit, a notification comes up on the repo driver's screen telling him the vehicle is past due. Otherwise, the data gets saved and sent back to the database along with the license plate number, GPS coordinates of the scan, and a time stamp. Using this data, repo firms can build profiles predicting a driver's home address, workplace, favorite restaurant, gym, etc. The system was so effective firms started hiring 'scouts' to drive around with a $23,000 camera suite just to suck up license plates all day.
These databases came online for use by any paying customer (usually repo firms) in the early 2000s, and by 2009 repos were purchasing their own camera systems to be installed on trucks. It's safe to assume law enforcement has been playing this game even earlier, and possibly have special access to other license plate databases.
My question is, what would be the most discreet way to defend against such blatant (even if they're just ignorant of the law), I'd rather avoid unnecessary attention to it if I can. If the final thing could look like a bedazzled license-plate frame that would be great.
I own my car in full and don't have any debt, but the.
I'm wondering the cleanest way to non-confrontationally 'mask' my plate to such scans. The cameras they show in the pictures use IR lights (usually for night vision), so I'm wondering if a sufficiently bright IR light near my license plate would obscure the camera from reading all the numbers?
![License License](/uploads/1/2/6/1/126172025/977158002.jpg)
IR light would mean it wouldn't be visible to the human eye, and if the camera couldn't get a read, it would just give up. Cameras collect data in frames, sending them to a processing unit that analyzes each frame looking for a recognizable pattern — like a license plate — so every frame that doesn't contain one is technically a 'failed scan'.
Is it possible to have a light bright enough? I would need a prototype and a camera that picks up IR to test it, so I was wondering if anybody else has more understanding or experience with this already?
Also, any alternative ideas to defend against this are welcome.
Edit: So, I've done some more research, and found this. He describes blocking a surveillance cam from watching your face by building the LEDs around some glasses and a hat. Like he mentions with this 'super-bright LEDs' method, you will highlight yourself to the camera but it will not make out the features of your face. Since this is computer vision we're talking about and not a security guard watching the screen, this is not an issue for my project.
I think the next step is to order a roll of IR LEDs, see if they work with my webcam or camera, and test arrangements on a license plate.
Like someone commented much earlier, you can still get scanned while parked unless you wired them to stay on, in which case you're dealing with car battery drain problems. I probably won't go that far with this project. It's sunny >300 days a year here, so my first thought for that was a roof-mounted solar panel. :-)
Edit 2015-01-21:EFF: What You Can Learn from Oakland's Raw ALPR Data
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closed as off-topic by schroeder♦, Mark, Rory Alsop♦Jul 7 '14 at 11:13
How Do License Plate Readers Work
This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:
- 'This question does not appear to be about Information security within the scope defined in the help center.' – schroeder, Mark, Rory Alsop