Integrated vehicle recognition and inspection system to improve security in restricted access areas

Identification of vehicles for security reasons has lately attracted much scientific and commercial attention. In certain areas, such as government buildings, army camps or country borders, the vehicles are inspected before allowed to enter. As this inspection needs to be thorough, it is a rather time-consuming process. To address this issue, this paper proposes a combination of distinct computer vision inspection systems that have been developed in the Multimedia Technology Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens, to automatically identify a vehicle entering a restricted area. The proposed system includes automatic license plate recognition, vehicle manufacturer/model detection and under-vehicle inspection. Combining the aforementioned methods can help to minimize the limitations of each individual technique and increase security in vehicle inspection. The characteristics, extracted during inspection, can be compared to the actual characteristics of each vehicle, which are acquired off-line and then stored in a vehicle record database.