THE CAMPUS SAFETY ISSUE
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Credentialing ■ License Plate Capture
Mass Notification ■ Surveillance
securitysales.com
May 2016 Vol. 38, No. 5
Plus: ISC West Wrap-up
TECHNOLOGY
License to Thrill
Campus Safety Clients
Advancements in automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology such as
greater versatility, comprehensive analytics, image enhancements and lower costs
add up to an A+ solution for today’s higher education market needs. By John Chigos
M
AINTAINING SAFETY on a college
campus is no insignificant task.
In addition to often containing a
population of sufficient size and diversity
to make it effectively its own city-within-acity, the campus also represents a substantial investment in the future. To create an
environment that fosters high-level learning, academic institutions must use every
means at their disposal to keep out individuals who may wish to do harm to students
and/or faculty.
Educational institutions typically either partner with police in the municipality where they are located or, if they are sufficiently large and well-funded, establish
their own police departments. In the former, local police are usually supplemented by on-campus security personnel. But
as with any security force, these people are
subject to the limitations of all human beings — they can’t be everywhere at once,
they are subject to mistakes, and they get
tired. They are also guarding against more
threats than ever before.
What is increasingly clear is that the
security issues educational institutions
face today cannot be solved simply by
adding more personnel. This is why more
and more campuses are turning to advanced surveillance technologies and
video analytics to help detect, record
and warn law enforcement and security
agencies about potential threats outside
or within their perimeter. Of all the video
analytic technologies currently available,
arguably the most effective is automatic
license plate recognition (ALPR). Let’s
take a closer look at the increasingly attractive benefits and features ALPR technology can bring to ace the security sales
test with higher education end users.
No Longer Limited to Mobile
Also known as automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) in Europe and elsewhere,
ALPR technology is commonly referred to
as “license plate readers” or “license plate
scanners.” It instantly “reads” the license
plates of all vehicles that pass before cameras connected to it. It then compares
those numbers to various databases for active wants or warrants (the databases employed depend on which ones the agency
using the technology can access legally).
For years, that was all ALPR did; however, this simple scan-and-check funcAutomatic license plate recognition technology
can be used to detect suspicious movement
patterns and deliver valuable data to security
and police personnel.
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PHOTOS COURTESY PLATESMART
tionality was only scratching the surface
of this technology. The cutting edge of
ALPR provides enough data analytics —
including plate number, state jurisdiction,
vehicle make, vehicle color, time, date and
location — to solve crimes, prevent terrorist acts, and find missing persons with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
Originally, ALPR was available primarily in one configuration: a patrol
vehicle-mounted mobile system, consisting of a laptop, some processing
hardware and anywhere from one to four
cameras specially designed for reading
plates using both white and infrared (IR)
light. Because of the tremendous cost of
the cameras and processors, and the fact
that these were closed systems, only capable of functioning with the company’s
own hardware, ALPR remained extremely limited in its deployment. This meant
its coverage was equally limited; mobile
ALPR units could be defeated easily simply by avoiding them.
In recent years, the “old school” thinking on ALPR technology has begun to
give way to a “new school,” aided by advances such that ALPR no longer has to
be confined to a closed system and specialized cameras. Readers can work with
practically any surveillance camera on
the market, including low-cost off-theshelf models. In addition to making the
technology available to more organizations, it makes possible the mass deployment of ALPR for only a nominal cost and
adds many more options for deployment
beyond mounting on patrol vehicles.
As a result, one of the main ALPR
trends is the migration from primarily
mobile to predominantly fixed-location
systems. Such systems provide the comprehensive, effective coverage that mobile systems could not achieve and yield
significant savings as well. Furthermore,
they are easily scalable, as the technology
can be connected to new cameras almost
instantly once they are installed.
The most effective ALPR is also open
architecture, which enables it to interface
with the wide variety of video management systems (VMS) currently driving
fixed-location surveillance solutions;
adding license plate reading capabilities
is usually a simple software installation.
Additionally, newer ALPR employs ad-
vanced video analytics for more than just
scan-and-check. Now, robust systems can
detect suspicious vehicle movements,
keep parking lot counts, function as access control without the need for ID cards
or parking stickers, and much more.
Analytics Adds to ALPR Appeal
The rise in camera-agnostic and easily
deployed ALPR is happening concurrently with the proliferation of citywide
video surveillance systems. Many cities
and municipalities are realizing that networks of strategically placed surveillance
cameras are the most comprehensive
way to keep a constant lookout.
More and more of these networks are
springing up on campuses too. But just
like cities, educational institutions are
recognizing the need for advanced video
analytics to supplement monitor-and-record functionality. ALPR analytic capabilities added to these surveillance solutions
are working to identify vehicles entering
the campus belonging to wanted persons
and immediately notifying law enforcement when such vehicles are found.
situational awareness are key to keeping
campuses safe from known or unknown
threats (and if security integrators need
to further sell it, ALPR even provides
a potential source of revenue from the
ticketing of vehicles that violate campus
parking regulations).
Even More Benefits to Come
In the very near future, campuses, as well
as other users of ALPR, will have access
to a major new development: high-definition (HD) ALPR. Until now, ALPR solutions made use of what could be referred
to as “standard-definition” cameras; that
is, cameras with about the same or slightly higher resolution than an NTSC television. To reliably perform ALPR with such
cameras, they had to be zoomed in tightly enough that the plate image took up a
significant portion of the frame. In addition, such cameras could only effectively
capture a single plate at a time.
As HD has become the standard, such
cameras are also more affordable. This is
a tremendous advantage for ALPR and
for end users. The next generation will be
ALPR allows campuses to know exactly how
many vehicles are on campus, to whom they
are registered, and what potential behaviors
can be associated with a vehicle and its driver.
ALPR-based analytics can provide
many other services for campuses. With
properly placed cameras, persons parking in unauthorized lots can be detected automatically and notifications sent
to enforcement officers. The system can
be used to control access to the campus
based on license plates. Furthermore,
it can detect suspicious movement patterns just outside the perimeter such as
circling. These alerts can be sent directly
to campus security or police.
ALPR allows campuses at any given
point to know exactly how many vehicles
are on campus, to whom they are registered, and what potential behaviors can
be associated with a vehicle and its driver. In the future, new identifiers will automatically be captured, such as vehicle
type (e.g. car, van, truck). Knowledge and
capable of processing video at resolutions
up to 4K, meaning the capture of multiple
plates from the same image will be possible. It also means cameras do not need to
be zoomed as far and allows for wider-area coverage. That translates to being able
to cover the same area with far fewer cameras — a savings not only in cost but also
in footprint, appealing to stakeholders.
Not all ALPR solutions offer fully comprehensive feature sets. It’s important for
an integrator to ask the prospective ALPR
manufacturer for a live demo of their solutions using the client’s chosen cameras.
By selecting the right technology, students
and faculty can have the peace of mind
that they have the best protection the marketplace has to offer. SSI
JOHN CHIGOS is CEO of PlateSmart Technologies
(platesmart.com).
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