Emerging technology and Big Data analytics: Realising the potential of Automatic Number Plate Recognition

Superintendent Mark Jessop is chair of the police Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) Northeast Regional ANPR User Group comprising 8 police forces: West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, Humberside, Durham, Cleveland, Northumbria and, Police Scotland. In 2017 he gave a presentation at the University of Leeds Institute for Data Analytics in which he called for police-university collaboration on ANPR that would bring university expertise together with police operational experience and data. This project responds to that call. It seeks to catalyse a process to realise the huge untapped potential of ANPR to tackle crime by mobile offenders and to promote safe traffic management.

Our work will include an audit of activities to identify potential and problems, and a scalable pilot study using machine learning to identify vehicles with stolen number plates that will greatly increase the hit rate and automate the detection of stolen vehicles and mobile offending: a pilot in West Yorkshire can be scaled out via the Regional User Group, then nationally and internationally. The project speaks to the N8 PRP small grant funding call’s specified interest in new and emerging technologies and the N8 PRP strand theme of data analytics.

Project website

https://www.n8prp.org.uk/home/library/small-grants/automatic-number-plate-recognition/