Study on IC Cards and Toll Loss Prevention Measures Based on License Plate Recognition Technology

0 Preface

With the rapid development of China's national economy, the mileage of expressways is increasing, and the scope of network and operation and management units are increasing year by year. Consequent loss of IC cards and tolls is increasingly attracting the attention of highway managers at all levels. . Theoretically speaking, the expressway is closed. Vehicles can only enter the highway from the entrance to the highway. After passing the exit inspection card, the vehicle exits the expressway. If the exit vehicle is found to have lost the card, it will also need to collect the card cost compensation. Cards should not be lost inexplicably. However, the actual situation is that with the continuous advancement of expressway network toll collection, the traditional road-level toll collection, monitoring, and communication management have been severely challenged by networked charging. The diversification and complexity of card and fee loss has become a failure for many years. Completely cracked puzzles. This article combines my experience in the development of highway toll collection and related management systems over the years, and briefly analyzes and summarizes the ways of loss of access cards and fees caused by expressway network toll collection, and proposes an application of license plate automatic identification technology to effectively prevent IC cards. The measures for the loss of tolls are designed to minimize the card and fee leakage loopholes.

1, status and reasons

Since the end of 2004, Guangdong Province has already implemented highway toll collection across the province. The operation and management units include the highway company, branches, provincial highway bureaus and other regional highway bureaus. In this situation, loopholes in any toll station at any management office will lead to the constant loss of IC cards and tolls. According to statistics, the loss of IC cards for expressways in Guangdong Province last year was more than 10%. Except for the IC card itself, the cost of the IC card brought additional financial burden on the system operation. The resulting evasion of fees has become increasingly prominent. In addition, a large number of card losses caused The total number of road network traffic cards is short, and individual toll stations have seriously affected the charging order due to insufficient IC card inventory.

After multiple investigations, the causes of pass card loss can be mainly divided into three categories:

One is that the hardware condition causes the card to be lost. Because some of the expressways are not closed tightly, the vehicles are stuck at the entrance to the expressway and are never taken out of the closed exit.

Second, the loss of the card due to the clearance of the vehicle;

Third, the card was lost due to the toll collector’s reason. Part of the export toll collectors are not operating properly (the vehicle is released through the fleet button to release the operation) or the toll collector cheats (private vehicles, private deposit cards, etc.) causing the loss of the IC card;

Fourth, the card is lost during the circulation. In particular, some official vehicles, military police and free vehicles receive a pass at the entrance and use the official card for export. The current operation cannot effectively prevent the loss of pass cards.

For the card loss caused by the first two reasons, it is mainly necessary to adopt a closed opening on the expressway, in addition to the possible opening areas outside the entrances and exits, and to strengthen supervision. This article focuses on the card loss caused by the latter two reasons, correlates the license plate with the entrance card issue situation, and increases the conditions for sending and receiving cards at the export toll booth, effectively reducing IC card loss.

2, system implementation

2.1 Implementation of ideas

When the vehicle enters the expressway, the license plate recognition device automatically identifies the license plate information, determines whether to issue a card, and knows from the IC card issuing machine whether the card has been issued, if the vehicle has issued a card, the vehicle license plate, IC card number and vehicle foreground picture Stored together in the database. When the vehicle arrives at the exit of the expressway, the license plate recognition device automatically recognizes the license plate information, and then finds in the database whether the car has received the IC card according to the license plate information. If there is an IC card, the toll collector must be notified to recycle the IC card (regardless of whether the vehicle is For free cars). The process is as follows:

Figure 1 System Implementation Flow Chart

2.2 Implementation principle

The entrance lane monitoring camera monitors the toll lane in real time. When a vehicle enters the video interface, the recognition module detects the change of the image, captures the foreground image of the vehicle at a high speed under the control signal, divides the moving image through the identification module, determines the license plate position and identifies the license plate. The recognition result is transmitted back to the charge computer. The charging computer can quickly search the database according to the license plate information. If it is a official car or other privileged vehicle that does not need to pay, it will directly release the card and card issuing operation. For the normal charging vehicle, the charging computer controls the writing of card information and sends the card, and at the same time stores the card issuing result, the license plate information, the vehicle foreground picture and the issued IC card number into the normal vehicle database. Information written to the local database is uploaded to remote monitoring center servers. The system structure is as follows:

Figure 2 Inlet module schematic

At the exit, lane monitoring cameras are also installed to identify the license plate models. According to the identified license plate retrieval database, if the database does not store the relevant information of the license plate, the toll collector manually identifies the license plate and vehicle type, determines whether to withdraw the IC card, performs the operation of printing the invoice for charging or directly releasing the operation; otherwise, storing according to the database Whether or not the card has been issued, determine whether to withdraw the IC card, and release the vehicle.

Figure 3 Export Charge Procedure

3, system features

(1) Innovation in management thinking. For the first time in China, the license plate recognition technology is integrated with the IC card management idea, which effectively eliminates the loss of IC cards caused by official cars, military police, and other free vehicle entrances, and the export of official cards.

(2) Prevent toll collectors from cheating. If the vehicle has been issued at the entrance, if the toll collector at the exit refuses to collect the IC card or does not charge the card for the cost of compensation, the system will call the police and record it;

(3) Improve writing efficiency. Through the database synchronization technology in the networked area, the information written in the IC card can be reduced according to the situation, and the speed and accuracy of the IC card writing can be improved;

(4) Shorten service time. By installing the license plate recognition system based on video stream in the entrance and exit lanes, the vehicle license plate number is automatically obtained at a high speed; if the official car is directly released, the service time is greatly shortened;

(5) The license plate recognition rate is high, the use of image high-speed identification technology, the average per second recognition more than 25 frames, each license plate recognition time is less than 600 milliseconds, the recognition rate of 90% or more;

(6) Prevent different vehicles from changing cards. The foreground image of the entrance toll station vehicle and the card number of the issued card are stored in the database. When the exit toll collector recalls the card, if the license plate and the issued IC card number recorded in the database are different, the system calls the entrance license plate image to perform image matching. Problem system alarm and prompt tolls handling;

(7) Auxiliary vehicle identification. This solution works synergistically with our existing vehicle license plate recognition system that has already been developed and can quickly extract models based on license plates. Increase the vehicle identification function without increasing the investment in hardware.

4 Conclusion

At present, the loss of highway tolls and IC cards in China is serious. In particular, the “privileged car” has been torn away from tolls and cards have been banned for many times, resulting in greater economic losses. This has seriously affected the management level and service quality of China’s expressways, and has increasingly affected Caused the attention of governments at all levels. Based on the existing infrastructure and hardware, the system summarizes and innovates a solution strategy, integrates the original license plate recognition technology with the IC card management solution, effectively reduces the loss of IC cards and toll collection fees, and significantly improves the efficiency of various departments. This system has now been put into trial operation in some toll stations in Guangdong Province. The customer's response is good. It will effectively solve highway tolls that have plagued highway tolls and management departments for many years, as well as the serious problem of IC card loss.

(Guangdong Provincial Institute of Electronics Technology Zhang Bin Fu Jiangcheng Hu Songli Wang Yong)