License plate capture and recognition involves several different technologies that combine to create a solution for a specific application — and those applications go well beyond tolls and traffic.
Given the prevalence of traffic cameras and toll plaza cameras, license plate recognition (LPR) may seem pretty straightforward: take a picture of a car, analyze it with software to determine the plate number, then compare that number against a database or store it for later forensic use. However, as is the case with any technology, the devil’s in the details. And in the LPR world, if any one of those details isn’t just right, the results can be downright useless.
While many people consider LPR to be a single technology in and of itself, it’s actually a number of different technologies — most of which can be used for many other applications — that have been combined to create a solution for a specific application.