Need for ANPR in India
Unlike other countries, India, with its one billion people population, has a unique set of needs for ANPR. The main use of ANPR is in highway monitoring, parking management, and neighborhood law enforcement security.
In India there is one death in every four minutes with most of them occurring due to over speeding. ANPR is used to monitor the vehicles’ average speed and can identify the vehicles that exceed the speed limit. In this case, a fine ticket can be automatically generated by calculating the distance between two cameras. This helps to maintain law and order which, in turn, can minimize the number of road casualties.
ANPR provides the best solution for providing parking management. Vehicles with registered plates can automatically enter into parking areas while non-registered vehicles will be charged by time of check in and check out. Number plates of the car can be directly linked with owner mobile phone and parking tickets could be paid without any extra effort directly from the user’s account against the ticket number generated. ANPR can support a cloud-based system pre-book and pre-pay platform for parking.
In India 200,000 cars are stolen per year. This number can lessen if proper steps are taken and ANPR system is used to track cars so that if vehicles are stolen, law enforcement will be able to identify when, where and the route taken by a stolen vehicle. This can help bring justice swiftly to such a vast nation.
India license plates are as diverse as the country itself–lots of styles, colors, fonts, sizes, etc. Source: Plate Recognizer Clients.
ANPR Challenges in India
The need for ANPR in India is strong. However, the solution may not be as clear.
ANPR in countries such as Vietnam, Australia and Italy, which have fairly standardized license plates, have accuracy levels often exceeding 90%.
India, however, is quite different. The variations of Indian license plates makes it difficult for an ANPR system to accurately identify and decode the license plate. In India, there are 210 million vehicles with over 50 different license plate types. The plates vary in style, color, fonts, sizes and even location in the vehicle. For example, certain regions of India would have certain plate formats and certain generations of vehicles have their unique peculiarities.
Moreover, cameras deployed in India tend to be of lower quality, thereby compounding the ability for ANPR engines to accurately decode the license plate. The low-cost cameras have limited visual coverage, are equipped with less acute motion and object detection sensors, and contain limited night vision capabilities. These three factors increase the number of blind spots and occurrence of blurry images. This situation is made worse during nighttime and inclement weather when visibility is lower.
As such, ANPR for India is particularly difficult and accuracy rates seldom exceed 70% from our internal analysis of our and competitive ANPR providers. This is a completely different story for our Germany ANPR and UK ANPR software.
Added Complexity of License Plates in India
As a matter of fact, in India, there are even situations where the license plate is hand-painted. This greatly adds to the complexity for our machine learning engine to decode Indian license plates.
Man paints license plate on car. Source: Reddit.
Other Ways to Improve ANPR
In addition to enhancing the underlying ANPR engine for India, we have made some concrete suggestions to help our customers achieve high accuracy ANPR with Plate Recognizer.
- Adjust Motion Detection. Depending on the camera and/or Video Management Software (VMS) used, we see images where the vehicle is barely visible. This may be due to the fact that the motion detection is too sensitive or that the camera and/or VMS is capturing the image right when motion is detected. Fixing this issue is easy: just set a slight delay in the image capture. So rather than immediately capturing the image, wait 0.5 seconds for the vehicle to be more prominent. This way, the number plate can be more present in the photo for the ANPR engine.
- Focus Camera. It is important to focus the ANPR camera on the incoming vehicle plate. We often see cameras in front of parking lots that aim wide across the parking lot rather than towards the entrance or exit areas. Again, the fix is simple: just adjust the camera position and width of focus so that the license plate can be more present.
- Proper Lighting. We have made great inroads with our ANPR engine to decode license plates in dark environments. However, in some situations, clients share images with us where the headlights make it impossible to even detect that a plate is present. To fix this, you’ll need to brighten the entrance/exit points or use a camera with higher aperture.
While the suggestions above pertain to all countries, not just India, they can significantly improve accuracy rates for ANPR if implemented correctly.
Rather than focusing camera on entire region, ANPR can be improved by focusing camera towards the red box highlighted above. Source: Plate Recognizer Client.