Elsag Datamat, Italy
Elsag Datamat, a Finmeccanica group of company devises, designs and develops high technology products, systems and solutions that stand out for excellent performance and reliability. Its goal is to support law enforcement in their missions of public safety and homeland security with many of its capabilities and other related technologies aimed at advancing and expanding those missions.
O2CR-CityPass Access Control For Restricted Traffic Areas
One solution to the problem of vehicle traffic in urban centres is provided by systems to control access to particular roads or areas.
To reduce high levels of traffic and pollution, this solution translates the costs that car users incur for the community as a whole into a tangible form, by introducing a sort of tax on road congestion and charging tolls or issuing fines for automatically detected offences (unauthorised access, etc.). The revenues thus generated can be re-invested in upgrading the public transport service and the road system.
With a view to this, the Elsag Datamat O2CR-CityPass system automatically identifies the vehicles entering urban districts in which special traffic regulations apply, such as restricted traffic areas.
The O2CR-CityPass system is based on Elsag Datamat’s O2CR (Outdoor Optical Character Recognition) system, developed specifically to read car licence plates. The system can read the licence plates of transiting vehicles in all light conditions (from bright daylight to night time). The O2CR-CityPass system has been type approved for restricted traffic area access control by resolution no. 26 73/7500 of the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. System performance is certified in compliance with UNI 10773 standards in category A and 97-100% of licence plates are correctly recognised.
The main product features are summarised below:
- Minimum environmental impact and ease of installation and maintenance
The use of a television camera with an integrated pulsed infra red illumination system means that this is a very compact solution which causes minimum environmental impact. The photograph on the right illustrates an example of an experimental installation, demonstrating how compact the sensor unit is and how easily it merges into existing structures. The photograph below illustrates a more recent sensor model comprising two integrated TV cameras with pulsed IR illuminators.
- Miniaturisation of the processing system
The adoption of embedded solutions based on INTEL’s Strong-Arm architecture has made it possible to develop extremely compact, low consumption solutions, housed in small containers which require no air conditioning and are therefore easy to install where needed.
- Data transmission
In addition to conventional modem links over existing dedicated networks, various other communication systems are available using GSM and GPRS technology.
- Reliability
The sensor system has a guaranteed MTBF of more than a year of continuous operation.
- Optical resolution
The O2CR-CityPass system uses a single camera to monitor a wide field of view (up to 4 meters wide). This avoids the rigid channelling requirements which constitute one of the main obstacles to introducing restricted traffic area systems in city centres.
- Type of licence plates recognised
The O2CR-CityPass system doesn't only recognise EU member licence plates, but those of any European country.
- Motorcycle licence plates
The system is capable of reading the licence plates of motorcycles approved to carry passengers by the Italian Vehicle Licensing Centre.
As the system constantly monitors the incoming video sequence, it can identity vehicles and recognise their licence plates automatically without any external trigger signal. Nevertheless, buried inductance coils have been included in the restricted traffic zone application to signal vehicle transit and acquire the necessary information to classify them based on their size.
This brings two main advantages:
- it means that the "best" transit image is always processed, which may not necessarily correspond to the image obtained when the vehicle drives over the inductance coils.
- it can compensate if the inductance coils fail to operate.
Continuous video stream reading allows the system to read and process license plates more than once as the vehicle transits. This brings two main advantages over other solutions available on the market:
- multiple license plate reads allow results to be accumulated over time, improving recognition accuracy and significantly reducing the probability of errors.
- the system uses the multiple reads to measure the speed of the vehicle to an accuracy of more than 95%.
This speed information at the access point can be used to issue fines, as well as for statistical purposes to measure the average vehicle speed at individual access points.
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