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On Tuesday, one of the largest LPR manufacturers, ELSAG, announced a major upgrade to "allow investigators to search by color, seven body types, 34 makes, and nine visual descriptors in addition to the standard plate number, location, and time."
Such a vast expansion of the tech now means that evading such scans will be even more difficult.
For years, Ars has been reporting on automated license plate readers (ALPRs, or simply LPRs)—a specialized camera often mounted on police cars that can scan at speeds of up to 60 plates per second.
Those scans are compared against what law enforcement usually dubs a "hot list" before alerting the officer to the presence of a potentially wanted or stolen vehicle. All scans are typically kept in a police database for weeks, months, or years on end.
These devices are now in common use by cities big and small across the United States, as well as many countries around the globe, including the United Kingdom. Police at the upcoming royal wedding in London will use LPRs to monitor unauthorized vehicles.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by leftover on Sunday May 20 2018, @02:57PM (1 child)
Have to wonder how much this is driven by observation from above rather than from ground level. Between helicopters, quadcopters, and high-mounted cameras, much of the observation imagery will not contain license plates. I could believe automatic ID of make-model-year-color from above but that is simply too broad to form a usefully-small population for further investigation. So, the expected next move could be a 1 foot wide QR decal on the roof. For the corresponding countermeasure, cover the rest of the roof with algorithm-confusing patterns? Then that will be outlawed so something else ... and on and on.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @11:20PM
observation from above rather than from ground level
In a decade, I'm sure we will look back on the prescience of your observation.
Wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of those gadgets are hand-me-downs from USA.mil via the 1033 program.
high-mounted cameras
With the cost of cameras, fiber, and storage approaching zero, it shouldn't be long until there is no unobserved/unrecorded square meter in any "developed" nation.
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