Just saw the tele tonight and they reported that the cctv cameras can now recognise number plates and link to police/dvla data bases. This was published by the council but was supposed to be 'hush hush' by the police, as it was a successful trial. The reason for converting the cameras was "to track thieves, terrorists, uninsured and untaxed vehicles".

There was no mention of speed monitoring but I guess that'll be a bonus for thier investment......

Time to make some money if you have a 'geo' and get cctv spotting.

F

 

Great - Big Brother is taking over the world a step @ a time

 

Nope Paul, just Northampton!!

 

Well they may use the cameras to "track thieves, terrorists, uninsured and untaxed vehicles", but the sad thing is that when they catch 'em they (or rather the courts) do bugger all about it [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

mb

 

cctv can't determine speed of vehicle's.

Rich

 

....but they can time a journey between 2 points and so calculate an average speed.......

 

It's a worrying thought...

These cameras can check/process/ticket 60,000 vehicles an hour.

Originally developed by the British security services for use in the City of London for the heightened Irish terrorism alert in the early 90's and were called "Black Cams" some are still working in the City with new ones going up as we speak (just look at the 5 cameras on a pole at tower hill in a fixed position)
These have been adapted succesfully to measure speed between 2 fixed points to determine an average speed, if you're speeding as you pass the second one...BINGO... 3 points.

They are now being installed all over the country....

Time to buy that GPS cam detector...

 

So we now have,

CCTV which they've put in OPtical Character Recognition (OCR) software onto, well back at HQ anyway. These Cant measure speed

Mobile speed cameras: Can measure speed and have OCR

Traffic master Blue Cams: Which have OCR and can measure speed, but the data which comes from the camera is not a number plate reg just a 6 character string based on a simple algorithm.

'Black Cams': Dont know anything about these unless theyre the High quality Colour cctv units used by Scotland yard in the City. Will have OCR capability, doubtful and speed measuring.

PS You can decode the trafficmaster string back to a number plate, well, if you work at GCHQ you can, becuase thats where all the data goes after Milton Keynes

paul M

 

My understanding is that these new CCTV systems read the front number plate and that they cannot read the square one in the front of my mota

 

Take a trip to http://www.spy.org.uk/trafficmaster.htm for some (worrying) information about TrafficMaster. In particular, how the data collected via the roadside monitors is not registered under the Data Protection Act - thus to have a reversible hash algorithm is probably illegal!

mb