Highways speaks to Chris Shepherd, lead product and support manager at MAV Systems, about the new MAV AiQ Advanced ANPR camera.
MAV Systems, part of the Traffic Group, was facing a ‘difficult second album’ problem.
Its first intelligent ANPR camera, the IQ, was a monster hit, shifting tens of thousands of units and allowing it to dominate the parking market with between 70% to 80% penetration.
‘No small footprint, considering it's an entirely British manufactured product,’ Mr Shepherd says. ‘Unfortunately, we'd set the bar exceptionally high. When you've set yourself a gold -plated product, the only way is to then move to something platinum-plated.’
So to answer this challenge Mr Shepherd and his team have built a device that is designed not just to dominate the market as a ‘best in breed’ product, but to actually save the market itself.
‘The entirety of the ANPR market is based on the integrity of the number plate i.e. readable and correct. Our market analysis revealed something called ghost plates – a significant increase in people tampering with number plates for nefarious reasons including just avoiding ULEZ or CAZ charges. The minute you start to undermine the ability to read the number plate, the pillar holding up the whole ANPR system starts to collapse.
‘So we created a set of technologies, which we trademarked, that mean we have the ability, if a car goes past at 120 or 150mph to forensically analyse that number plate and say if it has been tampered with and what the true number plate should be. Previously law enforcement, had no way of being able to robustly and automatically identify those plates.’
Yes, the boffins at MAV Systems have created a system that not only can see everything that is there – including but probably not limited to vehicle make, model, colour, category, speed, direction of travel and if it is stationary or not – they can see what is not there too.
How does it do this? ‘It's a mix of illumination technologies with smart algorithms and AI blended together.’
The NASPLE (National ANPR Standards for Policing and Law Enforcement) for a camera state that it has to pass a test when it is installed, capturing 98% of all VRMs (vehicle registration mark) that meet the reflective requirements and 95% of those captured VRMs correctly.
‘We can't do any less than 99% accuracy and we can't operate at less than 99% capture rate either. Now, it the big thing is it says the camera must capture all VRMs that meet the reflectivity requirements detailed, we're reading number plates that don't meet the reflectivity requirements.’
After ground truth testing, Mr Shepherd is confident that the ghost plate recognition functionality ‘operates at exactly the same level as the main camera’.
The British manufacturing of the product is also pretty smart: ‘We modularised the entire business, integrating existing products with significant production runs, so it can be diversified to the business need while having cost benefit of mass production. We can click modules on and off to meet the deployment of the camera without it having to be a bespoke tailored product every single time, which obviously has that higher margin.'
The end result is that ‘people should see the AiQ as the base product in their integration dreams’. Mr Shepherd adds: ‘It's more about making sure the customers are ready to be able to handle the amount of quality and breadth of data that we can provide rather than the other way around.’
Mr Shepherd says the AiQ system is already fully approved for the parking sector and there is a ‘roadmap’ towards achieving Vehicle Certification Agency approval for moving traffic offences and Home Office Type Approval (HOTA) for speed and red light enforcement.
However, the AiQ hardware is all approved and the system has been designed so anyone can drop their software into the unit and take that through an approval process – ‘all of the hardware sections of HOTA and law enforcement approvals would be met by the device’.
Mr Shepherd concludes: ‘As a business, we have grown and we are ready to start directly competing in the market. We would probably be far more a full partner. We would provide a lot more of the software solutions, consultancy to get the installation right and all that kind of process in the tender.’
The MAV AiQ provides:
- Panoramic camera
- GhostPlate technology
- Automated system diagnostics
- Advanced pedestrian and traffic data capture
- Enhanced video-based analytics
- Enforcement-specific tools for detecting moving traffic violations
- Secure data handling powered by TPM hardware encryption
- Precision GPS module
- AI-Accurate enhancement that improves performance up to 30%.
