| For reasons I have been unable to articulate, I have believed that if license plate readers are a thing, someone should open-source one that the general public could share. When a comment comes back that someone malicious will use the tech to stalk someone I really have no answer for that. That is indefensibly a bad thing. Of course the tech exists nonetheless (not open source as far as I know) and it could be argued it is even being used maliciously—or at least without the kind of judicial oversight we assumed would be in place. But one actor behaving badly does not justify the use of the tech by everyone. I read about the citizens of Minneapolis using decidedly low-tech means to track ICE vehicles prowling their community and it suggested a scenario where an open license-plate-tracking solution could "balance the scales" a bit (that is if you believe the scales to be imbalanced). I imagined not a license-plate reading dragnet but rather software where you had first to enter in very specific strings of ASCII characters and the software would only announce when there was a specific string match from the camera. To that end I vibe-coded an app for iOS in about 15 minutes using iOS's Vision framework and the built-in phone camera. Anyone could do the same. Nonetheless I only tested it with "HELLO" and "WORLD" using scraps of paper in my kitchen and never tried it outside as the craziness in Minneapolis seemed to have quieted down. I moved on to other projects. |
ALPR is fairly trivial now days, and a modern CPU can process thousands of plates per second (dozens of plates per frame, hundreds of frames per second coming multiple cameras pointing at different lanes of traffic).
The "product" around all of these is linking the plates traveling together, tracking routes through various cameras, identifying common travel patterns, and more disturbing travel patterns that are outside norm for a given plate or route (i.e. do they normally drive these 3 cameras M-F, but this Th, they went a different route and stopped somewhere for a while).
All that used to be done by the police/detectives/investigators on their own. Now the AI is automating this, and that is truly terrifying, especially for how often misreads occur.