In-Vehicle Mapping

Advanced Mapping of License Plate Reads for Greater Usability

Genetec’s license plate recognition (LPR) solution, AutoVu, is designed to help automate the verification of license plates against databases of vehicles of interest. AutoVu is equipped with advanced features that help operators become more efficient, and one such feature is in-vehicle-mapping. When using the AutoVu solution in a mobile application, each license plate read is geo-tagged with the GPS coordinates of where the read or hit took place. With in-vehicle mapping, when reviewing data from the in-vehicle computer or writing a parking ticket, users benefit from an easier method of not only visualizing the location of a read or hit with a map, but also benefit from having access to a specific location such as a street address rather than only the GPS coordinate.

Effectiveness of In-Vehicle Mapping in Law Enforcement Applications

Today, law enforcement officers receiving a radio notification of a new wanted vehicle can mine data using the AutoVu LPR to determine if it was spotted during the current shift, hence providing fellow officers with crucial information in a timely fashion. Without in-vehicle mapping, officers have the GPS coordinates where the sighting took place, for example longitude (45.639833) and latitude (-73.585675).

Although GPS coordinates give precise information, it is hard for a person to translate this data into a specific location. GPS devices, such as Garmin or Tom Tom, do not take GPS coordinates as input, therefore law enforcement officers have no means of clearly communicating this information.

With in-vehicle mapping, not only can the location of the vehicle be viewed on a map, but a street address can also be translated by the map from the GPS coordinates, and can be used by the officers. By panning and zooming in on the map, users can see where a license plate (LP) read or hit took place without having to decipher complex GPS coordinates and they can also obtain a street address.

Convenience of In-Vehicle Mapping in Parking Enforcement Applications

Reads are displayed directly on the map along with information including plate number, image of plate, date, time and physical address of read.

Parking enforcement officers patrol the streets to control residential permits and on-street time-limited parking. Since permit infractions are single read infractions, parking enforcement officers are on-site to write up the violation. Time-limit parking enforcement can be executed in three ways: by space or same location, by block face or by city block, and by district.

With time-limit enforcement by space, simply using GPS coordinates to validate that a vehicle has not moved between sightings, is sufficient to determine if an infraction has occurred. Time-limit is enforced by district by using the initial and final GPS positions as well as the district’s bounding GPS coordinates to calculate the violation. Because GPS coordinates are saved as part of the violation data, with in-vehicle mapping, the street address is also available. Therefore, by using this information, officers do not have to manually fill out a parking violation since ticket writing is automated, which increases their efficiency and minimizes data entry errors. For district enforcement, an additional benefit is the ability for officers to visually validate the infraction by looking up the location for the first and second sighting.

With time-limit parking enforcement by block face, the only way the software can determine if there has been a violation is to know if the vehicle has been parked within the same city block over the allotted parking time. With GPS coordinates, you have precise information on where the vehicle was first seen and where it was spotted the second time, but the software needs a map to understand the extremities of the city blocks to identify if a possible infraction has occurred. In-vehicle maps add this extra piece of crucial information that is necessary for block face time-limit enforcement.