Automated Plate Recognition and Truck Trip Tracking

US Transportation Collection2019PDFTech ReportHan, Lee D.Zhang, ZhihuaHargrove, StephanieBurton, MarkUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville. Center for Transportation ResearchTennessee. Department of TransportationUnited States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway AdministrationTennessee. Department of TransportationUnited StatesLicense platesMotor carriersOrigin and destinationTrucksIdentification systemsAutomatic license plate readersAutomated License Plate Recognition (ALPR)License plate trackingFreight trackingTruck tripsRES2016-3237B355August 2016 to June 2019This study sought to apply automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology to track trucks trips. ALPR does not work perfectly in the U.S. because of the thousands of different designs, colors, shapes, fonts, etc. of license plate from different states. To overcome this, a class of machine learning algorithms were developed to help track trucks by matching license plates read, correctly or incorrectly, by ALPR devices. While these unsupervised machine learning algorithms worked great for short distance (