Han’s Ongoing Research Uses Innovations from Generations of Vols
As you drive to the beach this summer, you may find yourself playing road trip games based on the license plates around you. How many states’ plates do you see? How many different animals can you find? Can you find a plate in every color of the rainbow?
Can you write an algorithm that recognizes, distinguishes, and accurately reads all those plates?
That last game may silence your car conversation for a bit, but Professor Lee Han, an expert in transportation and traffic engineering, spent years playing it.
“The US has more than 3,000 different license plate designs,” said Han. “These designs feature different fonts, logos, color schemes, reflectivity, and sometimes double or triple-stacked letters.”
While automated license plate recognition (LPR) technology has been in development since the 1970s, human verification is often still required for open road tolling, speed enforcement, parking control, and other traffic services in the US. This limits the efficacy of the intelligent transportation system (ITS)–the network of cameras, sensors, and other technologies that allow transportation authorities to monitor and manage the flow of traffic. Plate recognition is especially difficult on highways, where cars can be traveling at over 70 miles per hour.
Han has been working with the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) for more than a decade to improve the state’s LPR capabilities, focusing on improvements that can be layered onto existing components of the ITS.