ANPR. Did you know that the authorities now track you everywhere?
Over the last few years they have quietly been building a nationwide ANPR system that tracks your every move. 

                                     

Technology the Stasi could have only dreamed of...


                                          

                                        




                                Whether it be congestion charge, average speed monitoring, car park fining or just bolted to every other lamp post,
ANPR cameras are reading your number plates every few minutes, and they're here to stay. You may not like your
whereabouts being tracked constantly. Is there some way to fool them? ANPR cameras come in all shapes and sizes,
but are generally black with black lenses and pointed at the front of your car. They all work on the same principle
however. They shine a bright infra red light source at your plate and use an infra red sensitive camera with a fast shutter
to create a video image just like any other CCTV camera. Your highly retro-reflective number plate sends this straight back.
However the use of infra red means they are not blinded by car headlights, because most of this visible light is blocked by
the filters on the camera. The image from an ANPR camera is just of number plates shining brightly, night or day.

Then the clever bit. A PC with some special software stores frames from the camera and searches for number plates.
When it spots one, it runs a character recognition process that reads the plate and sends it as text to whatever application
needs it, whether it be a parking enforcement system, average speed calculation etc. Obviously number plates aren't perfect,
neither are computers, so dirty and damaged plates generate misreads, as do some customised plates.

On large systems like the congestion charge, there are thousands of misreads a day and they are discarded.








                                                                                       These snooping cameras come in many forms.

                                                                




Can they be fooled?



WARNING: The following is intended as a technical article of interest and is not intended as instructions for breaking the law.


Well firstly, all the criminal elements just clone plates from 'good' cars and they become instantly invisible. The sort of 'criminals' that ANPR
actually catches are middle aged Mrs Miggins who let her MOT run over a week.



     ANPR isn't as clever as it thinks. The technology is flawed. Here's why.....




Here's a number plate. Half has been obscured for privacy, but it says DK09 -  yes?  




And here it is on an ANPR computer screen.      HANG ON!      DK08?   What happened?



                                                                                       



It's just a bit of white sticky tape 'that the kids stuck on when they were playing'  Oh dear, now I'm anonymous.  How awful.




                                                                                                            


How does it work? The white tape is nowhere near as reflective as your retro-reflective  plate and looks dark in infra red, filling the gap in the '9'. The computer then
reads an 8!  The possibilities are enormous.

Oh dear, millions of pounds worth of technology fooled by sticky tape.