German firm Siemens has designed a new Automatic Number Plate Recognition camera system called Sicore which, it claims, ensures positive identification of motor vehicles.

The integrated image processing automatically identifies the vehicle and its licence plate in the image stream and Sicore, then forwards the data to a higher-level processing system.

The infrared LEDs-equipped Sicore’s operating range is 5m-30m for single-lane and 10m-35m for two-lane surveillance. The system can scan up to two lanes of traffic and even opposite directions of travel at the same time.

Other features include maximum read rates at vehicle speeds of up to 200kmph, special algorithms to allow recognition of licence plates from many different countries and the ability to run search lists for up to one million vehicles.

The system can be deployed for parking space monitoring and security, vehicle speed and journey time measurement as well as toll collection.