Conceptually, it’s not a big leap from license plate recognition to counting the occupants in a passing car. It’s not quite so easy technologically, but the innovative vendor of an advanced vehicle recognition system (VRS) has now cracked that nut in a military and border-security context, with potential implications for American law enforcement as well.
omniQ, which offers the unique Q Shield LPR/automated-enforcement and citation solution, announced in late 2023 the addition of in-car face-detection capabilities to its machine vision arsenal, as well as their deployment in some key global border environments. “We believe this new feature will further improve safety and prevent crimes and terror attacks more efficiently and quicker,” CEO Shai Lustgarten said.
The capability grew out of a partnership with some top government agencies in Israel, who wanted it for security purposes. It’s already in use there and may soon be coming to the U.S., where omniQ’s machine vision platforms also help protect the U.S. border.
“They’re using it for high-occupancy vehicles,” said John Whiteman, the company’s executive director of sales. “They need to know, is there one person in that vehicle approaching? Are there three or four? From the side of highways, as cars are driving by at highway speed, we can capture that and tell them, OK, that’s one person in there, three there, four in that one, etc.”
That’s required some adept engineering – the vision sensors used to capture faces are significantly different than those used to capture license plates. omniQ’s method for it fared better in comparative testing by Israeli authorities.
“The easiest part is capturing the driver, but we’ve done a deployment in a drive lane that has four sensors for capturing the driver, the passenger, the middle row of an SUV and the back row,” added Whiteman. “Then we turn the face captures over to a partner that actually does the recognition matching against various lists.”
Inland from the border, such a system would have obvious value enforcing things like high-occupancy vehicle lanes and boosting situational awareness during traffic stops by letting officers know in advance how many people are in the car, allowing them to prepare to control multiple subjects or distinguish suspects from others. And omniQ has a novel range of additional, related products that can help domestic law enforcement improve the movement of traffic in their jurisdictions, the efficiency of their enforcement operations and the inflow of their revenue.
LPR IS THE BACKBONE
With more than 80% of crimes involving vehicles, the backbone of any jurisdictional traffic/roadway-based enforcement approach is a powerful LPR system. Q Shield is the proverbial force multiplier that has helped users solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles and find missing persons. Its AI approach uses patented neural network algorithms that mimic the pattern-recognition functions of the human brain.
Driven by machine vision sensors, it captures the traditional LPR components of make, model, color and tag number, comparing the latter nearly instantaneously against local and national lists of sought vehicles. Beyond that, it can automatically issue citations when it identifies uninsured and unregistered vehicles – those are dispatched through omniQ, with no PD involvement necessary (until they receive the revenue, which is routed back to them through the company). Q Shield integrates easily with a complete range of relevant databases and hotlists.
The technology, though, can go farther: Automatically extracting key identifying information like plate numbers from vehicles and vetting it against huge databases stored in the cloud has great applicability in a range of uses.
For one, think about access control. That’s where omniQ started before expanding into the public safety space.
“Our system was primarily built for college campuses and public spaces that need vehicle management beyond just monitoring,” explained Lalith Caldera, the company’s director of products. “We provide the ability for a city or university to be able to issue driving and parking passes and monitor any violations linked to those passes. If certain vehicle traffic is only allowed within a defined geofence at certain times and someone violates that – for instance, like an oversize vehicle coming through a city center during peak traffic hours when it’s not allowed – we can see that, and they can receive electronic citations.”
The idea applies to LPR-enabled parking as well. Essentially, the license plate is the ticket: omniQ sensors read each vehicle’s tag number, verify it against a list of authorized parkers, and let it in and out automatically. That means tickets can’t be lost or switched. This approach can also be used to track length of stay and cite overstays. It’s driven by the company’s PERCS (Permitting, Enforcement, Revenue and Collection System) software that governs parking permissions, citations, payment collection and occupancy count.
The result is a complete virtual permit system manageable from anywhere. It’s in use at more than 60 U.S. airports, among other locations. A related Inventory Control Suite provides statistical overviews of measures like parking rates, vehicle occupancy, current and average lengths of stay and how often vehicles visit. “We can look at the occupancy of a parking area with vehicles and develop a kind of heat map in that sense,” said Caldera. This can help inform financial planning and guide infrastructure development.
The VRS also powers a Vehicle Inspection Package (VIP) that can document vehicles’ conditions as they enter and exit, providing insight into damage claims.
Where access control isn’t feasible – with roadside parking along public thoroughfares, for instance – a digital chalking solution monitors the position of tires’ valve stems to determine if vehicles have overstayed their allotted time, a significant advance over the laborious practice of chalking tires manually.
Together these components comprise an integrated solution that can encompass moving traffic on the roadways, street parking within cities and access and parking in secure or restricted areas. Such broad-based alignment can dramatically simplify and streamline the enforcement and citation work of police departments in jurisdictions where parking-type matters fall to them.
That’s relevant everywhere in these times of insufficient workforce, but particularly in smaller communities, where officers are more likely to wear multiple hats.
“Bigger cities might have their own parking enforcement department that’s separate from law enforcement,” noted Whiteman. “But enforcement is enforcement, and in many small and medium-size communities, it’s often the same person doing both. So our VRS users are often very interested in collecting data on parked cars and how long they’ve been there. If a car sits somewhere for 10 days, for instance, it may have been stolen and abandoned.”
omniQ’s platform also has a robust set of APIs for integration with other capabilities important to law enforcement, including emergency dispatch systems and other LPR products.
EVERYBODY CAN USE REVENUE
Taken together, that’s a pretty distinct suite of products and attributes – and one of potential interest even to departments not responsible for parking and permitting matters. There are safety and efficiency benefits, of course, and everybody can use the new streams of revenue derived from fines that might once have gone uncollected.
“We’ve found a lot of success so far in smaller communities, mainly because they don’t have the budget or grant money and have never been exposed to this type of program where we can share revenue for these types of infractions,” said Whiteman. “It might not be an eye-popping dollar amount, but to them it’s a major figure, and accretive to what the department is already doing. It’s found money, really.”
It can also be accessible with minimal initial investment. In some cases, omniQ has provided the vision sensors and backend software upfront for users who have subsequently paid it off through the newfound autocitation funding streams.
“I think we’re the only ones who have gone down that revenue-sharing road so far,” said Lustgarten. “Most of the LPR industry went with the original approach of looking for stolen vehicles and abducted children. They’re looking for specific vehicles. We can do that, but our approach of getting the equipment in there in a different financial manner is quite extraordinary.”
For more information, visit omniQ.
