Handheld Licence Plate Scanner/OCR/Lookup

[Bill Stewart]

More news dispatches from Brinworld....

http://www.chieftain.com/business/1109862027/1
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/01/196.asp

Bootfinder, made by G2 Systems in Alexandria VA,
is a combination of a handheld digital camera,
OCR software for locating and reading license plates,
and a database lookup system that shows the user
whatever information it has about that license plate.
The software runs on a laptop; the article doesn't say
if it has an online live data feed or just runs on stored data.

The two governments currently using it, New Haven Conn
and Arlington County VA, are using it to find
car tax and parking ticket delinquents,
so it's something that doesn't need a live data feed,
but that would be easy to patch on - the hard technology's
in reading the number, not in using it.

It was originally developed for tracing stolen cars,
but the developer found that to be a hard sell with
cash-strapped police departments, while parking enforcement
is a revenue-generating activity so anything that
lets those departments rake in money faster is an easy sell.
One city saw their car tax payment compliance go from
80% to 95% because it was easy to catch many non-payers
and to scare other people into paying before they get caught.

The camera can scan 1000 license plates per minute -
the article doesn't say how fast the cars can be going,
but the cities that use it have parking officials driving
down the street scanning parked cars' plates,
which are easier to aim at than moving cars.
Even so, that suggests that more widespread privacy-invading
applications should be easy to develop -
David Brin's "Transparent Society" prediction of
cameras and computing being cheap enough to become ubiquitous
becomes more realistic every year.