Moderate Mammal --------------------- I was aproached by a local electronics company who wishes to demo a police mounted camera with OCR. The idea being an in car PC will be kept updated via a wireless link with data from a central data base.
LEO are rather bad at recognising a wanted tag number. Not meant as criticism as I doubt if anyone but a idiot savant could keep the blurr of multiple tag numbers straight.
KY plates are good test subjects as ours, and I suspect most states, are 3M retroflective film that are very IR reflective. The camaras have a built in IR LED-LASER diode ring around the camera lense that "beam" IR light and this allows the reading of dirty plates up to about 100' away. I saw a laboratory demo, but I have enough on my plate and I decided to not help big brother. I have no doubt that there are many qualified engineers who will jump at the chance to get in on the ground floor of such a lucrative market. It is comming an there isn't a lot we can do to stop it. IMO armed insurection is the only option. Unlike LIDAr units this would be fairly simple to jam-spoof, but I suspect that laws will be pbutted to outlaw that option.
As was explained to me the numbers will be scanned, cross checked, and dumped. But the storage and retention of the tag numbers is simple too attractive to ignore. Add a GPS, tie that to the PC and you have a time-date and location stamp.
Back in highschool, in 1965, a friend of my sister was ranting about the comming number of the beast. She went on to relate how her church had discovered the "government" was plannng to indroduce "bar codes",a nd that after we all got used to them on products we would be required to have them tatoed on our forheads. She mentioned "IRM ink but had no clue what that was. As bar codes use spread I have often wondered how a small whacked out church knew about them, and at times like this if they might not have had a bit of foresight. I suspect that the facsists in the Homeland security would love to be able to track our daily movements. It would simplify their job of seperating the sheep from the goats.
At the time I don't think I had ever even seen a bar code. This link bar codes didn't become used commercially until 1966. I had related this to my wife and when we saw "Minority Report" we both thought of the bar code-mark of the beast link. I suspect that facial recognition software will obviate the need for tatoos, but you never know.
Terry
