License plate data analytics: convoy and cohort detection

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aim of this proposal is to develop computational and statistical methods for detecting convoys and cohorts of vehicles from streams of license plate data. Typical license plate recognition systems consist of cameras which detect license plates passing through their field of view and record meta information such as the license plate characters, the time of day, and the location where the vehicle was seen. Cameras may be fixed (e.g., mounted on pillars along a highway) or mobile (e.g., mounted on law enforcement vehicles). This project addresses research problems related to processing the streams of license plate reads coming from multiple cameras over a city-wide or metropolitan region in order to assist law enforcement officials. The two main problems we address are convoy detection and cohort detection. Typically, when a car is stolen the thief is accompanied to/from the scene of the crime by a cohort. Similarly, illegal drugs are typically transported across borders by cohorts of vehicles where the drugs are carried in a rented or otherwise unknown vehicle that is accompanied by the criminal's own vehicle which may be known to the authorities. In each of these two scenarios, law enforcement officials wish to identify unknown vehicles which are "significantly correlated" with a vehicle of interest. Challenges of these problems include defining appropriate notions of correlation between two vehicles along with how correlated two or more vehicles should be to be identified as a convoy or cohort. In this sense, these problems resemble the task of unsupervised anomaly detection where one is required to identify outliers in a given collection of unlabeled data. An additional challenge is the volume of data. Typical cameras register, on average, one license plate per second, and a metropolitan system may involve anywhere from tens to hundreds of cameras. This data must be handled efficiently to provide results to law enforcement officials in a timely manner. Our industrial partner, Genetec, is a world-leading provider of license plate recognition systems. In addition to direct support of research, they are providing access to a large dataset from one of their customer deployments to be used for modeling and validation.