Top ALPR features and technology for your organization

What is automatic license plate recognition?

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) or automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems detect and recognize vehicle license plates and help you find the vehicles you're looking for. ALPR technology captures and cross-references license plate reads and matches alongside video footage of incidents, contextual images, and GPS information. ALPR helps organizations gather relevant vehicle data, enforce parking restrictions, and gain insights about traffic flow.

The technology is used in various applications, like law enforcement, parking management, access control, highway monitoring, and more. And depending on which field you work in, you'll need different characteristics from your ALPR system.

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How to choose an ALPR system for public safety or law enforcement agencies

Whether you're looking to identify wanted vehicles, apprehend suspects, or ensure the safety of citizens, an automatic license plate recognition system can help you achieve your goals. Your team can leverage ALPR to speed up response time, close cases faster, and spend more time building community trust.

During your search for the right ALPR technology, here are some things to consider:

Reliable license plate reads

Your law enforcement officers are busy keeping your community safe. Spending time on license plate misreads can be frustrating. If you're looking for a suspect on a most wanted list, you want to ensure you are apprehending the right person. Stopping an innocent driver instead of someone on a hotlist can waste time and resources for your agency. You need a solution that provides highly accurate reads to get the most value from an ALPR investment.

Comprehensive analytics

Advanced analytics let you go from partial vehicle information to locating a lead. To narrow down suspect vehicles, intuitive filter functions can simplify searches, even when limited information is available. From the patrol car or precinct, filter searches using partial or complete plate numbers and get information on the vehicle's make, model, color, date, time, and location.

Quality images, day and night

The right camera provides accurate reads so you can maximize the impact of your ALPR operations.  Even in a busy environment or storm, your cameras should decipher all license plates in the field of view and read embossed lettering, digital license plates, and various plate designs. Find out how the AutoVu™ Sharp V ALPR camera provides crystal clear reads in all weather conditions.

Easy to deploy and install

Spending hours setting up a new solution and learning its software shouldn't be part of today's reality. Setting up your camera can happen in a matter of minutes. AutoVu Cloudrunner™ is a solar-powered ALPR camera that's ready to deploy out of the box—so you won't need any specialized expertise to install, set up, or maintain the camera.

During your search, you can choose a system that has a simplified installation. ALPR devices with motorized lenses can automatically zoom and focus, so you can benefit from remote optimization and eliminate unnecessary service calls.

Flexible connectivity

Your choice of ALPR technology can be versatile and provide instant connectivity, no matter how you decide to mount your cameras. Depending on your physical security infrastructure, it's important to choose a product suitable for wired connections or built-in LTE connections. A cloud-ready solution will also allow your organization to scale as your needs evolve.

Bonus: Choose a provider that specializes in mobile and fixed cameras

By choosing a provider that offers both mobile and fixed ALPR cameras, you'll get a unified experience by utilizing one platform for both. To add to your fixed cameras, you can opt for mobile units such as the AutoVu Sharp Z3 camera to allow your officers to catch perpetrators while on the move. Learn more about the AutoVu Sharp Z3 camera for law enforcement.

How to choose an ALPR system for parking management

ALPR technology can help your team identify more parking violations in less time, leading to better compliance.

Throughout your search for a new system, here are things to consider:

Highly accurate reads

As a parking operator, you know better than anyone that any time a plate is misread or a sign or object is mistakenly read as a plate, your enforcement officers must stop and validate the information, resulting in lost productivity.

Choosing a system that increases accuracy rates allows you to get more reliable data and greater efficiency out of your existing ALPR system, saving you thousands of dollars annually. Learn more about how much you could save here.

Read accuracy from all angles

Manufacturers have designed products utilizing ALPR technology that can read vehicles from different angles. If the car of interest is parallel, perpendicular, or at a 45-degree angle, your system should be able to get an accurate read.

Purpose-built solutions

The value of ALPR is directly related to its performance. A high-quality license plate camera will ensure coverage anywhere you need to identify vehicles and withstand various types of weather. AutoVu Cloudrunner gathers the information you need to solve the crime quickly. It combines an intuitive, cloud-based solution with ALPR cameras built to collect detailed vehicle-based evidence in all conditions.

GPS location

To gather relevant evidence to enforce parking violations, consider a solution that provides GPS accuracy at the street level, even in an urban canyon environment. AutoVu Sharp Z3 can precisely position objects and vehicles to understand what's around the license plate, placing reads into context.

Flexibility to enforce multiple parking rules

Whether you're managing parking on-street, off-street, or both, an ALPR system helps you get the job done. Your system's software should have the flexibility to enforce many different parking rights or rules simultaneously. Your solution can help your staff simultaneously manage permit and overtime regulations and alerts them to infractions so that they can take action.

Complete information on parking violations

When your officer identifies a parking violation, they should easily be able to provide all relevant information to justify the breach in a judication process. Your system should enable your team to get an image of the vehicle and license plate, as well as the time, date, and GPS location of the parked car.

A flexible solution

If you prefer using fixed cameras for parking enforcement, consider choosing a provider that also offers mobile cameras interconnected with the fixed deployment, allowing you to use the license plate recognition vehicle to find the people in violation.

AutoVu Free-Flow shows parking lot occupancy, the number of unpermitted or overtime vehicles, and other real-time and historical trends to improve your enforcement efficiency.

The importance of selecting a trusted ALPR vendor

Requirements for an ALPR system can vary significantly between different industries. Regardless of the environment you work in, it's essential to be mindful of the provider you choose. Make sure that the company you select has dedicated resources to engineering so that they continuously update the analytics required for the everchanging license plates within various markets, such as in the United States.

There is value to doing business with a company that has long-term knowledge of the intricate details of the parking industry, the ALPR market, and the daily challenges the parking enforcement authorities face.