A WEBSITE WITH SOME THINGS ON IT.

CAN YOU FOOL  ANPR CAMERAS?

Britain... The Surveillance Society...

Do they really need to read your number plate every five minutes?

Every time you go out in the car, one of these somewhere will be reading your number plate, sometimes as often as every few seconds in busy cities. If you know what to look for you'll see them on motorway bridges, in car parks, motorway services and junctions, even your local B&Q for heaven's sake...

They are number plate reading cameras. Often a sinister black colour with black lenses. They go back to ANPR servers that can process and store millions of number plates a day. Obviously these are not checked by people, they are simply automatically processed. Luckily computers are pretty thick and are easily fooled.

Reading number plates presents a real challenge to a camera. Just stand by a road at night and try to read a number plate into headlights and you will get the idea. Then you have to deal with dirty plates, damaged plates, all weather conditions and speeds and it becomes a serious challenge. ANPR gets round these issues firstly by photographing in infra red only to block out strong sunlight and headlights. A powerful infra red illuminator shines on to the vehicles and an infra red pass filter ensures that the camera sees very little visible light. You end up with the sort of image you see further below, where just the reflective plate can be seen. The setup is completed by using a high resolution mono camera with a fast shutter speed so images of fast cars are not blurred by motion.    

                                                                         Various types of ANPR camera.

Despite the tens of millions of pounds being invested in ANPR by our security forces, all the hardened criminal has to do is copy the plates of a legitimate car and he then becomes completely invisible to their databases. Lets face it, if you're prepared to steal cars, you aren't going to be bothered about copying or nicking plates. Then again the police are probably hoping that the criminals and terrorists are thick enough to drive around in cars displaying plates on their hotlist, like they hope that if they have an amnesty, they'll all come trotting in to hand over their Uzi's.

But what if you're a normal, perfectly law-abiding citizen who just doesn't like being tracked everywhere by these things?

                                                                               WARNING!

The following is intended simply as a technical article for those of you who are interested in the technology behind ANPR. Dr Bellend is a law abiding citizen with a clean licence and does not advocate the breaking of any of the laws of this fair land.

                  ANPR ISN'T AS CLEVER AS YOU MAY THINK.

                     Here's a 'doctored' number plate. It says DK09 which is what it should say. (I've obscured half for someone's web privacy though).

                                           ....and here it is read in by an ANPR computer, the result is at the top - DK08! ..... Hang on, DK08?

                                                                It's just a bit of white sticky tape. Can you see it?

How does it work? Well your bit of tape doesn't reflect infra red as well as the highly reflective plate and it appears black to the camera. The software then matches the character to the best match in its database which is an 8 not a 9.

Oh Dear!   Millions of pounds worth of Police and Government surveillance equipment fooled by half an inch of sticky tape!

There are endless combinations depending on your particular plate but remember...

Misreads are not checked by the Congestion charge people, because there're thousands per day.

This won't get you through average speed cameras unseen, the plate (whatever it reads in as) will usually still be logged as an offence and a nice policeman has to check your plate manually using the colour overview camera image so you will still be nicked. You shouldn't be speeding through roadworks anyway.

If you can make your plate read ridiculously enough, like next year's reg, most ANPR processors will ditch it completely. I stuck the tape in the middle of the zero in the 09 to make DK89 and the system refused to read it at all! I became ANPR invisible.

While Doctor Bellend does feel that law abiding people should be able to go about their business without being tracked everywhere, he does not condone breaking the law in any way. Don't try this on a public road because it could be illegal.