The Lane Cove council market square parking lot in Lane Cove in New South Wales, Australia has adopted a parking system powered by a license plate recognition system from HTS (Rishon LeZion, Israel).
The system enables drivers to be identified and billed according to their license plates alone, thereby eliminating the use of paper parking tickets.
The deployment of the system means that drivers do not need to wait at the parking lot entrance for a ticket to be dispensed. As they drive in, their license plate is recorded digitally and stored in a database. The system then compares the entry and exit times to determine the fee, enabling the drivers to pay on exit or via a kiosk.
Cameras placed at the exit verify that either a driver has paid, or was in the allotted timeframe of free parking that a shopping mall might extends to its patrons.
Except for a printed receipt which is provided upon request at the kiosk, the system is entirely paperless.
This month, HTS was awarded a patent from the US Patent and Trademark for its license pate character recognition system. The patent covers the neural network-based character identification methods used by the system.
Related articles from Vision Systems Design.
1. Vision system helps automate car park management
An automatic license-plate recognition system has been developed by Niaar (Dubai, UAE) for plate recognition at check-point gates in multi-story parking plazas.
2. Vision system detects empty parking places
Researchers from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Malaysia (Gambang, Pahang, Malaysia) have developed a vision-based intelligent parking space detection system that could help motorists identify the free spaces in car parking lots.
3. Vision system monitors the transport of dangerous goods
Engineers at Survision (Rueil-Malmaison, France) have developed a system to detect the signs on vehicles that indicate what substances they are carrying as well as their number plates.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
