Automatic detection of number-plate and traffic infractions of motorcyclists by Intelligent Transportation Systems

Public Transportation Strategic Systems are a digital transformation for the urban transportation service in the Colombian medium-size cities, from 200,000 to 600,000 inhabitants. The implementation of the urban public transportation services has not started in many cities; as a result, this cities in Colombia have an increase of illegal motorcycle taxis, which cause a high number of road accidents. The main method for controlling illegal motorcycle taxis is by giving the drivers transit fines. In order to give such transit fines, transit police have several control points in medium-size cities. In this article, we developed a mobile application to detect three types of transit infractions usually committed by motorcycle taxi drivers. The purpose of this application is to be a tool for the transit police agents to disincentivize the use of motorcycle taxis. The mobile application detects a possible transit infraction, saves the photo, motorcycle plate number, date, and time. Afterwards, the application generates a support for the transit infractions that will be issued by the transit police officer. We performed an experiment using this mobile application in the city of Valledupar, Colombia. The mobile application captured 40 possible transit infractions. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd