TERMINOLOGY AND ABBREVIATIONS OF THE ANPR INDUSTRY – PART 2

In the previous part of ANPR terminology, you could read about photography terms used in ANPR. In the present part you can review key concepts and their names in ANPR – with brief explanations.

Transportation terms in ANPR

ANPR is closely related to transportation. This is why a lot of traffic-related terms appear in the description of ANPR products:

• Vehicle registration plate types like
  vanity plates, vehicle owners paying extra money to pick their individual letter/number combination for the plate
  also called personalized plates and a mixture of
  reflective reflects the light
  (sometimes called retroreflective), and non-reflective plates.

• Application areas – or fields of use – like
  speed enforcement, recording speeding events and sanctioning/ticketing drivers,
  sometimes called
  road speed limit enforcement, and traffic enforcement, recording traffic offenses and sanctioning drivers
  congestion charging, a fee for the use of inner city streets in order to make urban areas livable
  also called road congestion pricing and
  road pricing charging a fee for road use
  (also known as tolling)

• Industry stakeholders include systems integrators companies that build turnkey systems out of component subsystems or traffic authorities maintaining the rule of the road by monitoring traffic via patrol cars and multi-sensor
  traffic points traffic monitoring and data collection device.

ANPR is closely related to transportation. This is why a lot of traffic-related terms appear in the description of ANPR products:

• Fixed ANPR is a device permanently placed on the roadside or on an above-the-road structure called gantry to capture license plates.
• Portable ANPR and mobile ANPR systems are operated from a tripod or from a patrol vehicle, or can even be-hand-held units.
• A trigger is a traffic detector to sense the presence of a vehicle. Its signal starts the process of automatic number-plate recognition. Triggering may be physical, like an inductive (or induction) loop installed in the road, or a motion detector sensing moving objects, similar to the ones attached to outdoor automatic lights. Triggering can be software-based as well and promising Vehicle Detection technologies are in the works.
• ANPR range expresses the distance from which a vehicle’s plate can be captured. This range varies widely from a few meters to hundreds of meters, depending on the device.
• A red light  camera senses traffic offenders driving through red traffic lights and takes photos that can be used as evidence by traffic authorities.

• An image buffer is the capacity of the ANPR system to temporarily store images for processing.
• Related technologies, (like information technology), and their technical terms like bandwidth, processing power, data storage capacity and encryption, (data is encoded and only visible for those who can decode it), are also frequently used terms.
• Onboard vs external ANPR refers to the location where the images of license plates are processed. Plate recognition can be integrated into the camera or – alternatively – it can be done outside the camera, on a central server or local computer. Both types of system architecture have advantages and drawbacks.

In the third part of the article you can read about spelling and term differences of US and UK English in ANPR.