Vehicle identification using automated number plate recognition (ANPR; also known as automatic license plate recognition) is an increasingly common requirement across a range of domains. In public sector security and law enforcement, ANPR is a key enabler for road-rules enforcement,traffic management, and surveillance or intelligence activities. In the commercial sector, ANPR enables a range of vehicle centric businesses including parking and use of toll roads.

At a commercial level, building large scale vehicle tracking capability requires strategic decisions about how to best leverage existing infrastructure investments, and where and how to strategically supplement existing capability with new investments.
Beyond this, the ANPR technical environment exhibits a range of challenges that are often constraining factors on the viability and selection of marketplace solutions:

• High and sustained volumes of sightings (hundreds of millions to billions per day).
• Combinations of fixed image capture sites and mobile image capture capabilities.
• Different technologies at the network’s edge – image capture, OCR, or image analysis.
• Real-time data analysis is required for effective operational decision making and execution.
• Maintenance of large sighting histories is necessary for post-sighting analysis and investigation.
• Constrained coverage areas because of infrastructure segmentation between multiple operators and asset owners

Key Vehicle Tracking Solution Requirements

The following abilities are required of an effective ANPR solution:

• Source and aggregate data from a range of image capture, analysis, and OCR infrastructures.
• Reliably source and transfer high volumes of data from distributed infrastructures with the lowest possible latencies.
• Execute multiple simultaneous complex multidimensional data analysis in real time of shared static and dynamic data.
• Create on-demand sequential compositions of related events (for example, sightings of the same vehicle across a metropolitan area).
• Derive operationally useful intelligence from underlying raw data (for example, compute travel speeds or approximate directions).
• Offer integration awareness for combining ANPR data with other types of distributed sensor or detector information (for example, from infrared sensors or mobile telephony ), and complementary technologies such as GIS.
• Enable data integrity assurance sufficient to withstand forensic and legal processes for financial and law enforcement purposes.

Event Zero delivers an industry leading event processing network (EPN) platform, specifically designed for the real-time multidimensional analysis of large volumes of disparate data.

Event Zero’s event processing network (EPN) platform can be applied to new or existing ANPR image capture and analysis solutions, leveraging many of the underlying capabilities to meet critical operational requirements and enabling operators to track more than 100 million vehicles in real time.

Features

The Event Zero Vehicle Tracking solution provides the following features

• Sightings data can be collected from geographically dispersed fixed and mobile site image capture, analysis, and OCR infrastructure using a comprehensive library of industry standard protocols. At the point of ingress, payload checksums and digital signatures are applied to insure against evidence tampering in transit.
• Wide-area data collection is supported using a secured Quality-of-Service aware network overlay infrastructure, allowing any IP-capable bearer (for example, POTS, DSL, ISDN, GSM, or WiMax) to be used for backhaul. Network latency is also explicitly taken into consideration when prioritizing data shipping and sequencing.
• Raw sightings data can be systematically enhanced with additional metadata unable to be added at the image capture and analysis point. Synthetic sightings data can also be generated from the raw sightings event streams.
• Real-time complex event processing is applied to track the current and historical states of all identified vehicles in the ANPR capture environment, including across all capture infrastructure boundaries. Upstream applications can access the real-time event data streams using a flexible and resilient standards-based EPN data storage interface.

• High performance— reliable, data assured, large volume sightings capture and real time data analysis aligned to key operational support requirements.
• Solution modularity—allowing enforcement agencies and other businesses to select best of breed or multiple infrastructures for image capture and analysis, but use a common platform to composite the resultant sightings data.
• Platform flexibility-enabling multiple different applications to be rapidly but incrementally built on the same infrastructure, and sharing the same data in response to emergent business needs.

Event Zero’s Event Processing Network platform forms an ideal foundation for systems integrators and solutions providers building feature-rich vehicle tracking and ANPR applications. The Event Zero EPN platform is available under OEM licensing and support arrangements, together with comprehensive development and integration training to support delivery of customer solutions.

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