Does an illegal plate circumvent average speed cameras?

deaston wrote: »

Same as speed limits. A village near me is a 30mph zone but almost no-one drives at 30. 40-60mph is the norm. Even lorries thunder through on full throttle - and they're professional drivers. And if you dare drive at 30 you get an angry queue behind you who overtake and beep at the earliest possible opportunity.

So why not just raise the limit to 60?

Indeed, no doubt the limit was 40, 50 or 60 up till a few years ago when councils were freed by central government from setting speed limits based on the 85th percentile rule (the speed at which 85% of traffic travel at on that section of road) and lower speed limits became a political football and something that looked good on the next election pamphlet.

AndyMc..... wrote: »

Well given it's reading registration numbers that's exactly what's it's looking for. Given you appear to be some sort of expert on such systems do tell us your qualifications.

It litterally looks for numbers and characters, it doesn't care about the format they're in at all.

It has to (for example) be able to work out the plates in something like 5 formats just for the UK*, then it has to be able to work out the plates for Ireland, and the EU.

ANPR is basically optical character recognition at the front end, it looks for any identifiable numbers/letters in an image, and then it compares them to various possible output formats and if there is any problem it flags them.

It's not that much different to when you put a letter on your scanner and use the OCR software supplied with it, except the OCR software in use is far better and only has to deal with a very small number of actual fonts.


*From memory we've used about 3 different formats since the 80's, and some of the oldest registration marks have been in use since around 1910 (one of the shortest I've seen in person was 4 digits).