Tollways
Open road toll lanes appear to be the preferred way to keep traffic moving by eliminating the bottlenecks associated with gates and cash lanes. The reduction in air pollutants from the exhaust of queued vehicles and the lower operating costs also cannot be overlooked. These benefits are offset by the requirement to provide accurate transaction accounting and an effective violation enforcement tool. Automatic License Plate Reading has proven to be the right solution for those requirements. To be truly effective, the ALPR system needs to be able to read all plate types and at any speed anticipated in the lane. The INEX/ZAMIR in-lane VES solution is deployed on well over five hundred lanes world-wide and effectively protects against toll fraud at speeds up to 120 mph (200kph) in all weather conditions and at any time of day.

In a typical toll lane there is a sensor to let the lane controller know when a vehicle is present in the lane; another sensor can quickly determine if the vehicle is a subscriber to the toll road by detecting the presence of an RFID tag/transponder in the vehicle. When the lane controller knows there is a vehicle in the lane but cannot detect the RFID tag/transponder, a signal is sent to the INEX/ZAMIR ALPR system to capture the plate of that vehicle and store the plate data, the image(s) from which the data was determined, and an image of the vehicle itself.

There are a variety of systems that can only capture the image of a license plate and store it remotely for later review if a violation is associated with that event. There are systems that can take an image and, via an OCR process, attempt to extract the license plate number from the image at some point later. The INEX/ZAMIR approach is to look at many images at the precise moment of each event, complete the OCR process and determine if the vehicle is violating the toll agency policies. All in less than 250 milliseconds! At that point a packet of images including the extracted license plate number, lane identification, date and time, and any other information available at the lane is immediately sent to a database. By analyzing up to 60 license plate images of each passing vehicle per second, with each image at a different contrast setting than the previous one, the INEX/ZAMIR solution is able to provide the most accurate ALPR results and the best possible images of each license plate.

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