vGRID ANPR

What is ANPR?

Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), also known as ALPR or just LPR, is the technology responsible for anlaysing images and identifying vehicle’s number plates.

This is done with video analytics that detect a vehicle, finds the number plate and then extracts the text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). There are several vendors offering ANPR detection, from camera and VMS vendors to dedicated analytics providers. ANPR can be processed by an onboard processor on a camera,in the VMS, on a separate server or in the cloud. Some vendors also support additional information such as direction of travel, make, model, colour and certainty.

These vendors often save and send their ANPR detections (metadata) in different formats making it difficult for organisations to mix and match vendors or share with third-parties.

vGRID ANPR

vGRID ANPR gives organisations the ability to ingest number plate metadata from these various vendors bring it in to a single system which provides the ability to alert on particular vehicles, search historical ANPR read or gain insights in to anonomysed traffic flows.

vGRID does not perform the ANPR analytics, but can connect to most leading systems via connectors.

The current suppoted list is provided here, if your preferred vendor is not listed as supported, please contact us.

Each connected ANPR camera will send vGRID an image assosciated with the ANPR read and the metadata with when the camera detected the vehicle and what the ANPR system though the plate was (eg “ABC123”).

Depending on site specifics ANPR systems generally send reads to a vGRID Gateway installed on the producers CCTV network. Where ANPR cameras are not centralised it is also posisble to send streams directly to a cloud ANPR endpoint reducing the cost and complexity of sharing multiple distributed ANPR sites.

Features

Alerts

Vehicle hotlists, known as Plates of Interest can be added to vGRID so that when a connected ANPR camera detects a read with a matching plate, authorised vGRID users are notified via the vGRID App (PC and iOS) or via email.

Depending on user and legislative requirments alert lists can be private to a user, shared with a group of users or an entire organisation. Alert notification settings can also be adjusted for each Plate of Interest, user and alert list.

Lists can be manually created, bulk imported or integrated with other systems, such as a stolen vehicle database.

When an alert is activated, users are given a easy to use interface allowing them to quickly, identify where the vehicle was detected, details about the vehicle, previous alerts, add comments and the ability to quickly verify the alert accuracy. Certain organsiations such as Police can also integrate the alert page directly in to internal systems where other intelligence realting to the Plate of Interest is held.

Search

Where approved and in compliance with local legislation, vGRID also stores ANPR reads that did not generate an alert. This enables historical search by Police or other approved agencies as part of an investigation. Like all elements of vGRID searches are audited and are strictly controlled by organsiational policies built in to and configured within vGRID.

For example, New Zealand Police have ANPR data stored for 6 months in accordance with their ANPR Policy and access to search results requires supervisor approval.

Search results are convienently displayed on a map, as a list and as images to allow ease of investigation.

Insights

vGRID Insights Dashbaord provides customers the ability to understand traffic and alert trends through anonomysed aggregation of ANPR reads and alerts.

This provides a breakdown of ANPR reads and alerts (grouped by whether they were correct reads or not) by camera and site. Users can see the reads and alerts for each camera / site by hour, day, week, month and year.

A heatmap also shows locations of alerts and also time of day and day of the week trends.

This is useful for security teams and other analyst teams alike.

Supported ANPR Software / systems