Obtaining good recognition performance is a real challenge when it comes to mobile license plate reading. The quality of built-in cameras used by mobile devices is far inferior to that of professional surveillance or traffic cameras. Moving vehicles or movements of the operator during image capture blur the image. Direct sun or strong shadows result in overexposed and underexposed images. Furthermore operators will point-and-click from different points of view, resulting in a wide range of possible pan and tilt angles for the license plate in the image.

Even under these extreme variations in image quality INTRADA HandHeld is capable of delivering the requested performance. The three cases below illustrate the capabilities of INTRADA HandHeld when dealing with different lighting conditions, variations in point of view, and camera movement.

Lighting conditions

The cameras in handheld devices provide only limited compensation for changes in lighting conditions. Direct sun or strong shadows very frequently result in overexposed and underexposed images. INTRADA HandHeld software deals with these effects as the use of additional light sources (infrared, flash) to compensate for this is not an option.

Point of view

The efficient use on the road requires point-and-click operation without tedious aiming procedures. This results in a wide variety in size, shape and location of the plate in the acquired image. INTRADA Handheld is capable of handling all these variations and offers the operator a flexible point of view.

Image quality

Camera movements during image capture have a blurring effect. For single-handed operated mobile devices movements are almost inevitable. Furthermore, many of the handheld devices perform a built-in image compression. INTRADA Handheld processes even these blurred and compressed images, making single shot operation possible. INTRADA Handheld simply performs the task it is designed for: seamless automatic license plate recognition.