When do we use this?
Fuzzy search is used by all of our clients on the handheld and also implemented on the LPR Capture Gallery and Admin Side Vehicle Plate Search. We use this functionality in order to reduce the margin of error on our plate reads making Operations Commander a more reliable service.
Background
The Operations Commander system has the ability for the system to map plates to new values. In layman's terms this means that this process of filtration can take an image of a plate and find many possibilities of what the plate may be matched to based on commonly misconstrued characters and the license plates registered or in the known area database. An example of this may be a plate that is read by LPR may be read as ABC128 when the plate is actually ABC123.
The user is able to make this update and store the details. This can be problematic for the user if the plate is never seen again and 8's are regularly interpreted as 3's
Update
This issue in the functionality of the LPR software is addressed by the use of the above methods and the use of the lookup table implemented to match which characters are easily misconstrued. The lookup table that follows is comprised of data from past LPR updates by users;
| Characters | Similar Characters | Characters | Similar Characters |
| 1 | "1I" | K | "HKR" |
| 2 | "2Z" | M | "HKM" |
| 3 | "38B" | O | "0DOQ" |
| 5 | "5S" | P | "FP" |
| 8 | "38B" | Q | "0DOQ" |
| B | "38B" | R | "HKR" |
| D | "0DOQ" | T | "TY" |
| E | "EF" | V | "VY" |
| F | "EFP" | Y | "VTY" |
| H | "HKMR" | Z | "2Z" |
| I | "1I" |
Visual Example
This system can be displayed on the handheld's everyday usage this is shown in the example below;
- Navigate to the 'Search Vehicles' menu on the main menu screen.
- This will bring you to this search bar and type in the license plate number that you are looking for. For this example we are using the license plate number AFVK663.
- Since we have looked up AFVK663 the Handheld will match you with the registered vehicle APVK668. It does this because in coherence with the lookup table the character 3 is similar to the number 8 and F is similar to the character V therefore fixing the license plate error by finding a plate in the database that matches.
